


1914

by newcanaan



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F, Historical AU, trigger warnings per chapter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:14:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 40,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27528241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newcanaan/pseuds/newcanaan
Summary: 'Dani looked at the girl sat at the table. She was a scrawny thing, under what she assumed was a grownups overcoat, her hair obscuring half her face and her eyes tired beyond her years. Mrs. Grose had not told Dani much, just to collect her after morning service, and to be patient with the girl, that she had suffered a recent death.'A manor house au set during the first world war, with newcomer!jamie for a change of pace, let me know what you think!
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 28
Kudos: 67





	1. War

**Author's Note:**

> Parental death tw, child death tw, food / weight mention and parental issues throughout 
> 
> Inspired by my own family history of working in the manorhouses to a degree but mostly just bly manor; come talk to me about these two on my tumblr: https://phoebe-fucking-bridgers.tumblr.com   
> my pinterest: https://pl.pinterest.com/annebonnys/?amp_client_id=CLIENT_ID(_)&mweb_unauth_id= 
> 
> (sorry the links are coming out shitty)

August 4th, 1914

The shot fired through the air the moment war broke out.  
Four years later, one million of them would be dead, twice as many Russian, almost as many French, she was told, and God only knew how many more bodies hidden in the earth who would not be brought home to their mothers. Fate did not discriminate so carelessly as men did, she would recall a number of years later.

“That was rotten of you,” the girl called. Past the trees, the two boys stood in the light of the glade, one – close to her age – the eldest Wingrave boy, and the other could not have been more than twelve. He lowered the rifle apologetically.

“I’m sorry, Dani, we didn’t see it was you.”  
No doubt he had been chosen as the new right hand, she mused, although she recalled his father had once been good friends to her own, and she harboured no ill will towards the boy.

Miles was still stood watching her, his hands in his pockets.

Trembling, the girl pushed past the leaves and down to the farm lane. She did not give them to courtesy to hide the scarlet veneer of her expression.

There, the fields gave way to the cerulean wholeness of the sky, and she had forgotten for a moment just how cold the English autumns could become. The wind sank down to the marrow of her bones. “God’s own kingdom,” she thought aloud.   
Since she had risen half an hour early breakfast service was prepped soon enough for her to visit the cemetery at last. The only others souls awake at that time were the groundskeepers stood smoking out the cricket field while they had the chance, who would always wish her a pleasant morning despite the obscene hush that was smothering the grounds. Dani thought, direly, of a mother holding a pillow over a dying child’s mouth. Mercy, they called it. When the phone had rung on that perilous morning, every inch of the house teetered to steel itself against the news. Her eyes darkened.

On the hour, the church bell tolled.  
Bly village was a score of six roads in a pale vein at the foothills. It boasted one church, two pubs, a post office and a schoolhouse, all of which had hundreds of years before been land belonging to the estate. And when the serfs had rose in the morning, the air they breathed was the same.  
Dani took a clamoured breath. The temperature had dropped that night steeper than any of them might have guessed, as if the emerald isle itself could sense the premonition of feet marching towards the front. In their quarters they had envied the cooks that could wake with the ovens, and taken to sleeping two or more to a bed to keep warm.

She wrapped her fingers in her sleeves.  
But her methodical disposition would not be moved by the dampening climate or the uneasiness of the news that had not quite reached them. In fact, Bly itself seemed all at once in reverence of its splendid isolation and the victim of a preternatural shift of consciousness. The leaves were dripping with relief.

There was nothing quite like a morning after rain in England, her father had told her, and that did not feel any less pertinent than when the phantom mist had embraced the cemetery that day, awaiting her arrival. For six days out of the week, it was bathed in golden dawn.

The shadowed grounds were still fresh with ice. “Good morning, Mrs. Grose.” The head housekeeper had emerged from afar, her winter coat drawn tight about her. 

“Good morning, Miss. Clayton, I suppose you have come from the village?” The woman opened the doors to the corridor. “When you have brought up the linen, could you take the scraps from last night down to the kennels? Perhaps then they might stop nagging the porters.”

“Of course, Mrs. Grose.”

Her own accent felt grating against her mother tongue; with her formative years in America, she could not manage to shake off the slight lilt that always gave the new visitors pause, and time had not given her the decency to learn the cockney slang, Polish or French cursing thrown about the place, but then again, neither had the kitchen.

On one of her first mornings, Dani had run out of there after a string of rapid expletives and hid herself in the rose garden with her head in her hands, until Mrs. Grose found her and said with motherly humour: “She cannot help it, the poor girl, she is American after all.”

From then on it had become tongue-in-cheek between the help there: Owen had been heard laughing again for the first time since his mother passed, and never missed the opportunity to shout, “She cannot help being American, Hannah,” whenever Dani so much as tripped on a cobblestone. But it was good to hear his laughter again. God, she had been in a state when first started.  
But that had been a lifetime ago. She was fourteen years old and her hands were more worn than her mothers. The animal fretting in her body though, that had been her father’s; the doctor could not deny his last self-administered dose of morphine had cured him of that permanently.

Mrs. Grose put her hand on her shoulder. “Have you seen him this morning?”

Dani shook her head. In all her years at Bly, she did not know of anyone – even his wife – who called the good Lord Wingrave by his name.

“News, from London they say.”

Her eyes, she realised now, were trained on the leaded window of the Lord’s office. Dani’s stomach turned for a reason she did not yet understand: something larger and all consuming than the likes of Bly knew. What should London want with a miller’s village all the way out there?  
Other than the odd letter from the city or tour of the estate, they saw nothing of the outside world. They were cushioned in the dire merriment of the valley, and that was how they would remain.

Dani had once daydreamed of the thought of travellers from around the country that had come just to see the distinctly English relic of the manor. It loomed over the fields, which themselves knew nothing of their history, that that rigorous, Protestant entirety of the ancient hearth reigned over them. How distinctly English of it.  
Now, she let out a sigh at the pitiful nostalgia that generation would chase as they traversed over the lawns, ready to talk her ear off about how things used to be as if she did not have a dozen things to do already. Besides, she could not imagine the village as ever having been any different than it was that morning, and she felt with good confidence it would always be the remain that way. Perhaps that was why she never felt the instinct to leave. 

“Well, I have the newcomers to attend to – ”

“Newcomers?” the American asked with a start. She apologised for interrupting, though her mind was tallying the beds that had been made up at dawn.

“The groundskeeper, dear, nothing for you to worry about.”  
Dani let out a breath. She could not help but notice the woman’s eyes were still on the front window and if the housekeeper was worrying about it, it was something worth worrying about.

Down the stone steps, the kitchen was a blessed furnace to bring her body back to life. 

“Morning, Miss. Clayton,” the man called. She could hardly see him for the smoke.

“Good morning, Mr. Sharma.”

There had been a parcel for the kitchen at the post office that morning. As always, the woman behind the screen shook her head at the sight of the bright-eyed thing with the transatlantic accent, as if she could not believe they let her work in an English estate. Since she was twelve years old, Dani had wished her a nice day regardless. Some things were killed with kindness.

“Are you alright? I didn’t see you at breakfast.”

“An early start,” she half-replied. Wringing her hands, she pulled the newspaper up to see but the words seemed more innocuous than usual. “Have you heard about the new starters?”  
Anyone who had worked more than a day at an estate knew if there was news to be heard, it undoubtedly would find its way somehow to the kitchen.

Half the cooks were married to the housekeepers, and the grocers would always go to the groundsmen for bets on the derby, not to mention the countless affairs between seamstresses and tailors and even the romantic strangers that sometimes passed through as the cousin of a cousin from some long time ago. No matter how much it might fight it, any rumour born there would inevitably trickle its was down room to room and into the mouths of the kitchen.

And they all knew Mrs. Grose and Mr. Sharma had something as equally complicit as it was unspoken, that they shared part of the mind with one another without ever having to say it. There was not a thing going on in the place one of them knew that the other did not.

Whenever she thought about it, she could not remember a time at all when some revelation had been had while she had been in any other room.

“Have you eaten yet today?”

Dani was looking out the grey window, which offered very little respite from the intensity as usual.  
She could not understand the anxiety humming below her skin. Perhaps the rogue shot that morning had spooked her, but she swore she had woken up with her heart pounding like rabbits feet against her legs, by the knowledge that somehow this day would change things irrevocably. News, from London, they had said. They had heard about the Archduke’s death before most of his empire. 

“Has my mother been down yet?”

“Not that I saw but I had to run out for a delivery at half past.”

Her expression changed. The last thing they needed was a bollocking from the upper help: not that Mrs. Grose had ever done such to her staff – not only because they made sure that the need should never arise for it, but because as a women she took no genuine pleasure in the task.

In spite of her, she felt sick to her stomach. Perhaps it was the date.

“You need to eat, Dani,” Mr. Sharma called, but she had already spirited herself away to the quarters before she had the chance.

In her bed, her mother was a grey outline of a body. Dani had curled up into her single bed that night for fear she might freeze to death. But between her shivering and the frantic dreams, she found the woman’s breath became shallower depressions in her chest. When she sensed her there, her mother curled the blanket tighter around herself.

“Not today, Dani,” she said.

The young woman pushed her hair out of her face. “Mom . . . it’s a busy day.”

“I can’t today.”

Dani’s hands dropped. She supposed she was working for two again. With a silent sigh she pulled the blanket about her to keep her warm, with promises of coming back as soon as she got the chance, and she kissed her on the cheek.

-

The world had not yet fallen back into place. The young woman thought of her body crashing through a glass window, how the shards would fall against her, and how the glass screamed because it too was breaking.  
Therefore it was no surprise that she felt the stranger across the table following her gaze, a hollow green light, past the walls and the floorboards to some reflection of the world no one else knew of.  
It had been a long time coming, that look in her eyes and on her face and even the air she breathed which seemed too gentle for the rest of the space – a slow lapping of water that had finally, finally, spilt over and swallowed her whole after that unremarkable death of an unremarkable woman only a few days before. It was like the eyes a cat that had seen a ghost and nobody else knew it was there, sat contemplating whatever it was doing in the house for all those years.

“And Mr. Taylor,” the woman said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

The girl raised her head. She felt the top of her cheek flush. Beside her, her father had stirred from his quiet stupor. “My condolences, for Mrs. Taylor.”

Miss Clemens, his daughter almost whispered aloud. Her name was Miss Clemens. But she too was in too much a state to move her lips.

“It is a terrible loss.”  
The sounds of the room teemed around her, white noise in a dark room filled with the three of them. And the housekeeper had been kind to them when they first arrived, offered them food and tea to warm them up after the perishing country roads, but neither of them had the heart anymore to care for it.

“So all your paperwork has been approved and your contract is here to be signed, I imagine Mr. Dudley will give a much better introduction to the grounds and what we will need you do here, but given your experience I am sure you it will be no skin of anybody’s nose.”

The two arrivals looked down at the paper.  
For half a second, her stomach flipped, her father did not know how to read or write and she only stared with moon eyes as he signed the thing in resignation. She sat back in her seat, not even realising her own hands were clinging over her chest.

“I will show you over to your room then, your daughter can come back with me to start on service.”

The girl raised her head properly for the first time. It was like seeing a dear in the headlights that knew what a motorcar was and the headlights meant and had already felt the impact.

“I . . .” her father grasped. “Jamie’ll stay with me.”

“Not here I’m afraid, Mr. Taylor. Only the boys work the grounds here, she will stay indoors.”

“She’s never worked with housekeeping before, she knows the horses and the dogs better.” His voice had softened almost. “Better at it than me, in fact.”

That was a lie, the girl knew, she had never seen anyone work like her father did. The hours he had spent on providing for his family, the meals he had passed off to make sure his children ate, there was no telling where his labour began and his nights ended. And Jamie loved him for that, in her own way.

“It will be alright dear, I won’t leave her for the wolves . . . or the cooks, that being said.” Mrs. Grose tried catching the girls eye in a manner of maternal comfort that was so desperately lacking, but her stare on her father’s face would not be broken by the world. They were close, the two of them it seemed, but that was expected given what they had been through. He tried again, explained that she had been working by his side since she was old enough to hold reins, but the woman only shook her head.

“Not at Bly. This is the way things are.”

Some final light in her body faded, one she did not even knew she had. The composure she had been keeping behind a hundred manned walls, for the first time since her mother’s death, paled a little.

“This way to the stables,” Mrs. Grose told them.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Mr. Taylor take his daughter by the shoulder and kiss the top of her head. Her heart went out for the girl, but there was nothing a stranger let alone the new head housekeeper could do for them. 

Outside, the sun had finally dragged itself to ten o’clock, melting the cold from the ground that was not still half-cast in shadow. She took a breath of the leaf-crisp air.  
It felt good to be out there, somehow. Perhaps because it all the more made her enjoy the splendour of a fireplace or a boiling kettle, the warmth of the kitchens when Mr. Sharma came down the stairs to begin breakfast.

The two of them were to live in the loft above the stables as their predecessor had, a space of around eight feet with a bed, a cot and a sink. The cot had been taken apart and tacked onto the wall so that a child might sleep on it, but Mrs. Grose did not know what age she might be before she arrived, and knew if the small thing had had a proper meal once in her life she might not have fit at all. Mr. Taylor checked the taps were working and put his one case on the bed.

“Miss. Grose?” a voice said.

Mr. Dudley was standing in the doorway, half a bucket of water in his hands.

“Mr. Dudley, it seems your staff has just increased.”

He nodded in response.

“I take it I can leave it to you?”

“Need you on the pitch first.”

“And you, sweetheart, you can follow me.”

The young girl bristled at the feeling of her hand on her shoulder. Sweetheart? She had not even been called that by her own mother. But the housekeepers had was firm, if not warm, and she led her back down out to the door.

Her father did not say a word, walking off with Mr. Dudley without looking back.

“Jamie was it?” the woman swept over the grounds with surprising speed and the girl had to jog just to keep up with her. “We can go through the rooms first for the turn down, then I am certain Mr. Sharma will have something for you in the kitchen. When was the last time you ate?”

Jamie bit down on her tongue, refusing to speak to the stranger. Perhaps she might take her for a mute and leave her be. It did not matter what she was doing, she told herself, she just had to get through the day.

“And your brother is to follow soon, I heard? At least it might make Bly feel more like home.” Inside, the bustle of the kitchens could be heard already. “It is an estate of around twenty staff, twelve permanently living on the grounds. All of them that work indoors stay in their quarters, but I think your father mentioned you staying above the stables with him? Very well, then.”

She took her up a few dozen steps to the second floor. “The Wingraves are a good family, a kind family; they appreciate loyalty and reward good work, but tolerate any fools. The children can be a handful, but I do not think you would ever be needed to watch them. And we almost always have visitors, which is why we have the staff we do. The Lord’s brother and his protégé are here at the moment.” They came to an abrupt stop in the doorway. “Tomorrow morning you will be here at six o’clock, I will send Miss. Clayton for you.”

Her hand was back on her shoulder, the woman pressing down on her collar through the coat

“And Mr. Sharma?” she called to the man with his back to them. “Please get the poor thing something to eat before she starts.”

-

For a house with two wings, twenty or so rooms, one kitchen and two bathrooms, the girl could never quite understand how they had so much washing to be done. She must have spent half her life in the laundry room, up to her elbows in hot water and sweating through her apron, and at the end of a twelve hour day there were still sheets to be dried and linen folded and beds made up.

She wiped the back of her forehead against her arm. It was enough, for the day at least.  
And she still needed to go back to the village before the afternoon began.

Mr. Sharma had been worried about her (some things would never change) and sent her out on a fool’s errand, which she suspected was more to give her some space away from the Manor than anything else. Regardless of his motives, that was how she found herself back on the two-track lane at twelve. When the wind picked up it made snakes in the fields and she ran her hand over the browned grass. It was a lovely day, if nothing else.

When she had collected the order – a pitiful little package that no doubt could have waited – she was startled by the shout of the baker’s youngest.

Dani had been making her way down the bridleway at the time, lost in her own head, when she was shaken awake by the sound. 

“Did you hear it?” the boy called. “German’s have invaded Belgium.”

Dani stopped in her tracks. The sunlight was splintered over her face, painting it in thousand colours. “What are you talking about?”

The boy was leant down on his bicycle.  
He was Eddie’s younger brother, with the same milk-bottle glasses and dark hair, which meant he was often trailing after her whenever she was running errands and generally being a nuisance. “The Lord just sent word to the post office, who told my father.” He was scratching at one of his legs with his foot.

“Then I should probably be getting back, don’t you think?”

“See you later, Dani.” He was away faster than he had appeared.

She felt herself fall than rather than sit at the bench beside her. Her chest was tightening in a way it had none done since she was a child, and she stayed like that for what felt like hours, trapped in her own body and her own beating heart as the eyes in the earth turned over her.


	2. By the Side of the Road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Parental death tw, illness mention, smoking tw, alcohol tw, body image tw and food mentions through out, blood tw - sorry if I missed any out 
> 
> I wrote this at four am :) comments go a long way!!

August 5th, 1914

It is you, it is me, it is us.  
When the girl awoke in the thrill of the 4am autonomy, she found that she was somehow alone in there and she was not. Then again, Dani had seen ghosts for as long as she could remember, and most of them – in her dreaded experience – did not go out of their way to harm her, and would leave for some other inconceivable cosmic place after a while.  
Perhaps that was why she managed to roll over and was back to sleep after the initial, cold terror her phantom sleepwalker had induced.

The shadow had stood at the end of her bed for the better part of an hour before finally fading through the hall door. At first when she awoke – unable to breathe – she knew that she had not been visited by this one before, this young girl with empty eyes she could not see – except in some secret place in the back of her mind she had long ago locked herself away from, before the sanity of the day-to-day in which she could tell nobody what had come wandering in the night. They would have her institutionalised, certainly, to some dark corner of a poorhouse where the existence of Bly might as well have been as certain as the things that haunted her. She was the one that knew what went bump in the night, she was the one that looked them in the eyes. Or, even still, the place where their eyes should have been.

Dani had started to shiver again, a sign she was coming back to herself from that terrifying lake, in which there was only the dissociation of terror from the self.

And still somehow she knew she had seen that spectre before, even if it would be years still for her to understand it, when she was very young and it had stood over her cot as she slept. The presence had never looked at her – not precisely – only stood staring ahead as if she were not there at all. There is a relief in being inexistent: it was a courtesy of the imagined.

The only blessing of that time was that in her infantile mind she had not yet brought herself to comprehend her own reality, and whether or not it was her own being and soul that should be questioned, not the trespasser to her childhood nursery. The walls of it had been rose pink.

And the young woman’s ghost that would stand over her bed, she would turn after a while or so and fade back into the blankness, her jacket limp around her outline.

Her blood had thudded back through her body. Perhaps her heart itself had paused in mortal apathy. So that was all, her chest murmured. There was warmth in her hands again and it made her realise how truly perilous the cold had been. And the ghost, who was she, how had she died, how had she followed the American across countless miles and empty nights to stand again over her bed again and not say a word?  
After the night she had had, Dani did not know how she slept so peacefully until six o’clock, or how she had not overslept at all. She only thanked whoever might be listening.  
Her mother had gotten up already; this would be a sign she was feeling better, only it left a cold hand over her chest. No matter, she told herself, pulling on her dress.

There were two slight footprints at the end of her bed that almost could have been her own, but she knew her shoes had no such imprint and scuffed up the evidence before anyone could see it too. Nothing disturbed her quite so much though as the smell of fresh rain, hanging delightful in the air, in spite of the fact it had not rained all night. As she grew older and the memories of those surrounding years simplified in her mind, the woman was finally able to begin pulling together the pieces of string that had previously eluded her, and wondered perhaps if it was not rain but lake water she had noticed that hesitant morning.

“Good morning, Miss Clayton,” the girl said as she opened the door.

“Good morning, Miss Wingrave,” Dani managed a smile for her.  
She set the tray on her sick bed and smoothed the blanket with her hand. “How would you like your tea this morning?” She began to pour out the drink for the girl.

“That alright, Miss Clayton, I can do it myself.”

“Feeling better already, or do you just not like my tea?” Dani asked.

The girl screwed up her face, biting her tongue. The housekeeper chuckled and set the teapot down. “Well, alright, sweetheart, you eat your breakfast.”

“Will you come see me again today?”  
Flora Wingrave was only six years old on the day that the war broke out. Her eyes, painfully wide, were unclouded of any concern outside the confines of her room, in spite of the weight of the sickness in her chest and in her lungs until it began to spread outwards, through every inch of her body on those nights when suddenly she could not breathe for the blood in her mouth.

Dani leant forward to kiss her forehead. “Of course I will, Miss Wingrave. How did you sleep last night?”

“I had a dream, but I can’t remember what it was about.” The girl had leant back in her sickbed, her breakfast untouched. “I heard there were new arrivals starting today, is that right? Do you think they would like a tea party? That would be splendid.”

“It will be the first thing I ask them,” Dani promised her.

-

As she came through the village, she knew she ought to pick flowers for Flora on the way. The housekeeper stopped by the cemetery, that had been laden with bluebells and snowdrops in the springtime, now feverish with the last of the year’s wildflowers still desperately hanging to the consecrated ground, as certain to be there as their grief.  
She pressed her skirt flat as she rose. From the window, the reverend’s boy called down to her.  
“Did you hear, France has taken Alsace? Wonder what the Germans would make of you Yanks?” Dani stood in the autumnal breeze. Tongue-tied, weary of them all, she pulled the kiss-gate, shut and left the cemetery.

Two of the younger groundskeepers caught up with her as she made her way up the lane, but they had long been working under Mr. Dudley and despite the age difference Dani had always found them pleasant enough company.  
They asked after her mother and she answered as politely as she could manage, before baiting them with questions about the hounds instead so that the conversation did not linger.  
“Ratters keep scratching at the new groundskeeper’s door,” one of them said, “told Dudley they’d never get all the fucking mice out of the place.”

The bridleway took them up the long country road to the estate.  
Of the two boys, the quieter – busy stripping a piece of grass apart as they walked – she remembered rather fondly, as he had talked her down from a particularly bad panic attack not long after her father had passed away. “Dads, right,” he had said, stood awkwardly with his hands in his pockets, “can’t even pass without managing to cock everything up.”  
Dani had felt guilty afterwards that she had not tried harder to talk much to the out-of-doors help afterwards, when he had come running across the courtyard in the middle of the night just to check on her.  
There was a certain camaraderie in the diligence with which the housekeepers and the cooks and the porters ran and surely it must have been much the same in the stables, so why should that not extend to them, even if they saw them for ten minutes a day?

The boy took the grass between his thumbs and tried to make a whistle. “Have you met the new ones yet, Dani?” the older boy asked.

The girl shook her head. 

“They must be from up York or something.”

“No they’re not,” the younger told him. “They’re from the Black Country, have you heard them?”

“They must be east of there. They sound strange is all.”

“Wonder if that’s what the Germans say.”

The boy was rewarded with a punch to the arm.

“You wait and see, I told my father I’ll be across to join the war as soon as I’m of age, show the Prussians a thing or two.”

The boy rolled his eyes at him but Dani felt her stomach turn. They were only children still; how many of them would be sent to fight in the coming winter, certain to return for dinner? Even the younger of the groundskeepers could have passed for the legal age, surely, scrambling to be shipped of like dogs on a hunt.

She could not think about that at the moment. She needed to get the wildflowers in water for Flora and she had promised Mrs. Grose she would show the new girl the turn down.

Flora was in a fitful sleep when she went upstairs, and so Dani left the vase on her bedside table. The girl looked pale and stick-thin, worse off than she had been in the summer out playing on the cricket pitch. Perhaps her strength had waned with the cold.  
She had heard rumours of that bloody night she had been brought into the world, too premature even to be kicking and screaming, and Dani was glad in part they had not been at Bly at the time to witness it. The doctor had been called from the village at four in the morning as all the house girls milled outside the room, wrought with nerves. Dani pulled her blanket up to bring some warmth back to the girl.

Downstairs, Mr. Sharma was clearing the stations for the lunch service. He had tried, in vain, to get a word out of the newcomer for almost half an hour, asking where she was from, what work she had done before, but the girl had only sat with her gaze in some faraway place and her tea slowly going cold.

“Miss Clayton,” he turned as she came through the door, “lovely to see you, as always. Perhaps you might get a word out of Miss Taylor here?”

Dani looked at the girl sat at the table. She was a scrawny thing, under what she assumed was a grownups overcoat, her hair obscuring half her face and her eyes tired beyond her years. Mrs. Grose had not told Dani much, just to collect her after morning service, and to be patient with the girl, that she had suffered a recent death.  
Her fixed stare softened at the sight of her. She took the still-full plate and teacup and emptied them out before going back the way she came.

“Come on, then,” she said, although she was feeling half-hearted at the prospect after what the boys had told her.

“Quite the morning to show up, what with the news and everything,” Dani said, leading her up the oak staircase. The girl fell in step behind her. When she saw her eyes, that distant, forest-green light, take in the enormity of the Manor, she could not help but feel a pang of familiarity. Christ, she had never even stepped foot in a place like that before she arrived at Bly Manor, let alone the richest estate in the county.

Dani jogged up the final flight of stairs. That wing of the house was all bedrooms they called the boarding rooms, even though she could not remember why, and as most would be thankfully empty until early December it offered a quieter corner for the girl to get used to her surroundings. They came to the farthest room, where she passed her her uniform.

“Don’t think Mrs. Grose would be all too pleased with the housekeepers dressing as they like,” Dani tried a smile in spite of herself. The girl stood there in her boots and overalls; she ran her hands over the black and white cotton. “Ready to get dressed?”

“Suppose,” the girl finally spoke. Dani let out a breath.

“So you do speak English.”  
She held her hand out in a manner that at the time seemed far too formal for such a cat-and-mouse exchange, but years later she would scream her lungs empty to think that her body gracing the strangers had been so unceremonious, that in no way could comprehend the intangible manner the arrival would change the following years at Bly, that she should bore a place in the woman’s heart that was so inconsequential, so easy to throwaway that until the day she died she did not think of the name of her on her lips and have every sinew of her being not twinge in the miracle of remembering. “You can call me Dani.”

The girl glanced over her features properly for the first time.

She took her hand a little too sharply, and she felt colder than anything. “Jamie.”

“Well, alright.”  
The young woman held out her arm to take her coat that Jamie passed her with some reluctance. Too uncertain as to whether or not to tell her to look away, the newcomer only turned her back to undo the clasps of what she had been wearing for the past few days.

Jamie was almost the same age as her then – only two weeks short of her fourteenth birthday in fact – and just an inch shorter than the young woman, but to see such physical evidence of the divergence their young lives had taken was unthinkable. The angles of her shoulder blades gleamed sharper than bone, the structure of her hipbones prominent even bofore they had grown out, and as she was halfway counting the column her vertebrae, Dani had to turn to look instead at the sky out the window.

The girl moved like a cat, folding her clothes on the bed when Dani finally looked back. She was pressing her shirt self-consciously as it was still too big for her, her collar somehow folded the wrong way. Dani gave a sympathetic huff and circled around her. “Can I?” she thought it better to ask first, her hands hovering over her.

“Alright,” the girl replied. Dani turned back her collar and smoothed the ironing lines on her sleeves. When she adjusted her skirt so that it sat in the appropriate place she sensed Jamie tensing at the sudden undivided attention of the housekeeper. Dani wondered when it was last that somebody had even given them their time.

“There you go.” She stepped back to give her a moment to breathe. “Let’s get to work.”

-

They had buried her mother at the side of the road.  
It had been a hundred miles from their home, or wherever it was she was born, or wherever it was they had worked for the longest time, and there was not even a cemetery nearby for some romantic wanderer to lay flowers at her gravestones over the remorse that nobody else had.

And so their uncle – not even by blood, mind – had dug six feet by the railway tracks where they had not seen a carriage pass for days, and laid her there to rest.  
Jamie could recall dimly that as they stood in the soft downpour those two weeks before, she had worried herself to tears that she would screw up the passage she was supposed to read. Her uncle, being the only one that could read properly, took her through her King James Bible the night before by the gaslight, but her grief had become insurmountable by them, something larger and more whole than herself. They had put love-in-a-mist over her grave, not for any heartfelt meaning they had agonised over for days, but because it was the only thing that grew along the train tracks.

And no matter what came in the following days, the days of the dawn light more beautiful than anything she had ever seen, or the promise of the blue, uncut sky after so many days of rain, all that she could think about was the woman laying cold and alone under the earth.

Jamie had jumped when the girl took her hands, but Dani continued to turn them over as if she were reading a fortune that would tell the girls purpose on that earth. Jamie pulled herself free.

“You’ve worked in houses before?” Her fingers twitched from the contact.

Jamie nodded slightly. She did not know this girl, not yet, she did not trust her, and was not going to spill out her exhaustive history to her at any rate.

“Outside,” was all she could manage, “with my dad.”

“Oh,” Dani said. “Afraid you’ll have to start at the bottom then. We can make up the dining room for the evening then Owen will need porters for tonight. But if your hands are peeling by the end of the day, Mrs. Grose has something for it.”

Jamie furrowed her brow.

“I came up here four years ago and I still have to do it.” She brought her through the kitchen haphazardly, aware of the steam seething from the machines and the glare of the gas ovens. “Everything must be cleaned through the basins, soap and water first and then just water. All of the silverware is to be polished in lemon and vinegar and any other cutlery has to be dried straight away. Everything else will get put up on the racks unless they need it straight away, but believe me, they let you know if they do. And if it ever feels like too much at any time, just remember, at least you’re not in the kitchen.” The America girl looked over her. “Are you alright?”

Jamie was a lifetime away, buried six feet below the ground, between her mother’s wilted hands. And what was her father doing, her brothers, she thought, what they had to do. They were lucky to be at Bly at all. “Yes.”

Jamie rolled up her sleeves and felt through the scalding water. “Better to get on with it then, yeah?”

Dani took a breath. “Alright, then.” She took her place beside her.

Jamie did not speak for the rest of the night, not when her hands began to bleed into the basin water or she caught her arms on the oven shelves. The other girl had tried to talk to her once or twice, reminding her to change the water and not put knives in the sink, but after a while they fell into an easy silence punctuated only by shouts from the cooks.

Jamie was surprised at the lip Dani gave them – perhaps it was an American thing – but in no place that she had ever worked before would anyone their age or their sex talk back to the cook as she did. Perhaps the girl could surprise her yet. Past the rigidity of her posture and the shaking of her hands, there was something she possessed that was too bright, too carefree for a place like that. And they only seemed to laugh her off as if they were more at ease with one another than their own families. Probably because they spent more time with them, Jamie thought.

“Alright, ladies, eat up.” Mr. Sharma laid two plates on the only clear station: a tray full of scraps he had the decency to bake in gravy and spare mash potato like the everyman’s shepherd’s pie.

“Yes, chef,” Dani shouted, picking up two sets of cutlery. “Do you not want to eat?”

Jamie shook her head. “Not hungry.” 

“You might regret it tonight, it’s your last chance.”

When she saw that Jamie would not be having a change of heart, she scraped her serving onto her plate too. Jamie huffed at the girl’s appetite, amused at least.

When they were finally discharged at ten o’clock her skin was burning and she hurried to put her jacket on so that the bright-eyes American did not see the blood. God knew her worrying was the last thing anyone needed.

Stood smoking by the stables, Jamie watched the men bring the horses in before they were spooked by the dark. Jamie would have brought them in sooner.

She had been too preoccupied stroking one of the beagles to notice that the girl had approached her. And there she thought she was free for the night from her undisturbed gaze. Jamie let out a plume of smoke that the girl watched every inch of.

Jamie was still disturbed from the way the other girl looked at her, so earnestly and without presumption. It was a dangerous thing to wear her heart on her sleeve like that. And despite her overwhelming presence, that undeniable anxiety scratching just below her skin, or how her laughter seemed to erupt from the pit of her stomach, Jamie could not help herself but offer the woman a smoke. To her surprise, the girl accepted. Jamie managed to light it after a couple of attempts. She felt exhausted beyond belief.

When they had finally burned their way through the intolerable silence, Jamie put her hands in her pockets.

“Right, have a good night, then.”

“Hey,” Dani called after her. Jamie looked over her shoulder. “It is going to be okay, you know.”

The young woman only had time to offer half a smile at the obscene faith in the face of the stranger, before she had to turn back so that she would not see what state she had left her in. Jamie wiped her face in a fury. She cursed herself for acting like a child.

Inside, her father had already returned, sat on his bed to light the only lamp in the room.

“Dad,” she said, closing the door behind her. He nodded at her, looking at her uniform. Who would have thought, his daughter not dressed in her overalls?

Jamie crawled into bed that night on an empty stomach. Goddammit, she turned over, recalled what the girl had said. After a while, with sleep eluding her, Jamie helped herself to a liver-ful of her father’s gin and climbed into bed beside him. He felt for her hand and took it without a word, until they finally drifted off into the early hours of the morning.  
She awoke once, petrified in a cold fever, thinking she heard her father crying. At the end of the bed, the shadow stood over them. Jamie froze.  
After a moment or two, the figure sighed and turned away, melting into the shadows. Jamie’s eyes were fixed on the space where she had disappeared, until suddenly she was jolted awake by the sight of sunlight through the window. Shit, she thought, turning over. Her father’s side of the bed was empty. Out the only window of the room, the smoke was rising in the distance from the village as it did every morning, and she let a heavy breath. So this was home.


	3. No Surprises

August 6th, 1914 

When the groundskeeper’s boys returned in the early morning they seemed to have caught more pheasants than they should have for that time of year. The recent ferrying of cars and couriers through Bly was perhaps responsible, driving them deeper into the woods of the estate. In the low mist, the rabbits scattered, bristling with paranoia in the thistles like something mad.

The young girl passed them on the way to the manor and noticed the birds strung proudly over their shoulders, their own bloody medallions.  
Owen would be pleased anyway, it would give him an excuse to roast off the last of the fortnight’s reserves and the bones were good for broth, if she remembered rightly.

She stopped to scratch one of the ratters – the young thing feverish at the foot of the hunters – which caused a phantom itching behind its ear. The kitchen doors creaked in their familiar way as she came down the stairs; she could never quite forget the warmth of the kitchen rushing to greet her like an old friend. Much to her surprise, they were not alone down there at that hour.  
Mr. Sharma was preparing tea and deep in conversation with Mrs. Grose, who was warming her hands by the holding ovens, but the outline of the girl at the far end looked unfamiliar and all at once completely at home.

“Oh,” Dani began, faltering at the table. She saw Miss. Taylor tense under her voice, but she continued kneading on the counter without a word.

“Miss. Clayton,” Owen said. “Nice of you to join us. Tea?”

“Please.” Dani took a seat and checked the time. She had ten minutes to spare at least.

“I hope you don’t mind, Jamie was up with the lark and said she had nothing to do ‘til she found you.”  
Dani did not know why the others’ ease around the newcomer unsettled her so. The familiarity of first names too was not one reserved for any but the closest of workers, and even after her time there they rarely forgot themselves with such shortcomings. Perhaps it was to make her feel more at home.

Dani realised he was still waiting for her to reply. “Of course not.”  
Despite being much higher in the food chain than she could ever hope to be, the cook had always had the courtesy enough to ask her these things.

Mrs. Grose put her hand on her shoulder as she passed her her tea. “Thank you,” she murmured. Her hands were crossed on the table and her eyes still heavy from sleep.

“Quite the baker, that one,” Mrs. Grose told her. “Are you sure you haven’t been in the kitchens before, love?”

At that, Miss. Taylor turned. Her sleeves had been rolled up in a rush and there was some redness high on her cheeks from working the dough for such a time.

“No, ma’am, just the gardens.”  
No doubt where she got the slight strength of her body from, years of perseverance in the cold and the rain and the anguish it brought down on them. Dani did not know how they worked as they did all year round. Then again, she too did not know how the housekeepers kept the place running every day too.  
The young woman was washing the flour from her forearms when she realised she had been watching her mindlessly. Mrs. Grose caught her eye and gave her a curious look. Unbeknown to her, they had thought that it was the young American’s influence encouraging the girl

“Right then, breakfast for you three before the wolves wake up.” Owen laid the humble spread on the table. “And for your help this morning,” he placed the plate in front of Miss. Taylor, “dig in.”

Jamie took the cutlery from him with a fleeting smile, “Thank you.”

Dani could not recall if she had seen her smile before. It was a little lopsided, as if she had ground her teeth too much on one side, and it seemed to grow over her beyond her control.  
Her expression dropped when she caught Dani staring. She averted her gaze to her plate to avoid those empty-lit eyes. “Egg and soldiers?”

“My favourite,” Miss. Taylor shrugged.

Dani grabbed herself a piece of toast even if she did not have the stomach for it. Experience had taught her never to skip breakfast.

“Bastard!” Miss. Taylor gasped when her fingers pulled the burning plate.

“Language!” Mrs. Grose said, but Dani had held a laugh in behind her hand, and when Jamie caught that – for the first time in the few years together – she smiled back at her. An honest smile, at least, one she could not help. And with all the sadness that had consumed her in those early days, that had seemed larger than herself, she learnt that her happiness too could be greater than her own being.  
And did that mean it too was out of her control, as natural as the coming of the rain? There was nothing that could be done with her heart but to feel it.

Dani must have seen her expression darken but did not mention it, God bless the girl. She had tucked into breakfast with an appetite that she had not before seen, maybe off the back of having missed dinner. 

“Mr. Dudley’s boys have some pheasant for you,” Dani spoke up.

“Did you see them in the village?”

“No, I shan’t go down ‘til Sunday service.” Dani put her knife on the table. “Why?”

“Just wondered if you’d been to see the baker’s boy again,” Owen said.

The girl’s eyes lowered, preferring the age-old scratches on the table. Jamie was watching, a bizarre interest unfurling in her chest she could not dismiss – something voyeuristic that she resented herself for. Why should she care what some pretty American did in her own time, too pretty as far as she was concerned.

They worked that morning in the pale silence. Dani only spoke when she had to, finding herself not having the heart for conversation as of late.  
They spent two hours downstairs, throwing sheets across the line and steaming the linen. The newcomer was treating the machinery like it was a loaded gun.

“Have you ever ironed anything in your life?” she asked.

“No,” Miss. Taylor replied, a little affronted. The girl’s shoulders dropped.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Let me show you.”

At first the heat seemed unbearable, festering below the skin and running down her back, but her fingers were nimble and fast and they got through most of it much faster than Dani would have alone. She could not say that the girl did not earn her keep. She made a note to tell Mrs. Grose that night.

By lunch they were blessed with the outdoor air once again and the midday sun was on them. The cooks were smoking by the steps on whatever they could afford, or what they had won in poker the night before.

“This way,” she told her. “We stop and change the quarters only once a week, but it takes a while.”

There were very few windows to light up the room. Around a dozen beds, most of which would be occupied at night, had been made up half-heartedly. They never cared as much when they knew they were getting stripped anyway. The bedsheets were worn and transparent as glass, Jamie noticed, a hell of a lot better than what they had. The hay-beds up in the stables might have kept them warm enough in winter but she had lost count of the rats they killed in the middle of the night. Ought to get one of the dogs up there, she thought.  
Jamie saw the girl move in a blur in the corner of her eye. “You alright?”  
Dani screwed the sheet up and buried it in the basket. Jamie saw a flash of blood and turned away. She could not recall ever even sleeping in the same room as another girl, let alone boarding with them, and knew her father and brothers would not know what to make of her bleeding over her bed when it finally happened.  
It made her feel very young still. Maybe there was something wrong with her, inside.  
She realised she had her hand knotted over her stomach with a certain dread. What if her father would try to marry her off when he could? The thought sent a tremor through her body. She needed to keep an eye out for the signs, whatever they might be. She looked back up at Dani, still with her back to her, but she would rather have died than ask her that. The girl did not give her the benefit.

“We keep our cloths in the washrooms, whenever you need them.” She had not met her eyes but must have seen the look of apprehension at the sight of blood. “And then we throw them in the fire after. I don’t know what it was like at the other places you were at.” Phantom hands wrapped around her stomach in a seizure, a premonition of what was to come.

Thankfully, Dani had already moved on. They stripped the last bed together, in no particular hurry despite the flush on Jamie’s face.

“So on Sunday, I was wondering, after Church if you wanted to walk around Bly for a while? We’ll have some time before lunch service, and the weather has been pleasant enough these days.”

Whatever Jamie had been expecting, it must not have been that. Her hands stilled on the linen. “Not got your baker’s boy to see?”

The girl pulled her mouth to the side, and if Jamie did not know better she would call it apprehension. Then again she supposed it was no surprise that the boys in the village would fawn over a girl like her.  
Dani looked over her then in the half-light of the quarters, knowing beyond her words what Jamie knew too, and perhaps why it was that the scrawny young girl had not wanted to work inside where she would be subjugated to the visitor’s stares, why she preferred to drown in her father’s old overcoat and keep her eye line on the floor. No one had prepared her for this walk in life she had not wanted. It was easier to be as she truly was, half-wild and grinning and out in the open air. And maybe Dani wanted that for a moment too.  
In the end she only shrugged, her voice wavering with the most honest thing she had said all that morning – all those years before she would begin to understand why – “Would rather be spending it with you.”

Jamie felt herself stepping back a little on uneven feet. “Would have to see.” She had not even visited the grounds yet where her father worker, where she looked out at.

But the moment seemed to have earned Dani some courage, as she finally said what she had been thinking all day: “It was nice to see you at breakfast this morning, smiling. And eating too, for once.”

It was entirely too much for Jamie, this closeness, this forged familiarity, and she only went back to pick up the baskets before walking out with Dani behind her.  
She felt the urge to grab the stranger’s arm and ask her more, would she see her on Sunday, had she slept well the night before, surely not to have been up so early, but somehow knew she was treading an already delicate line with the newcomer, who may have been – if not shy – a little haphazard still, a little rough around the edges: an animal in the corner that knew all too well when it had to fight for its life. And when the time came that she should love her even, she would look at the forest green of her eyes and read a certain truth, that in her whole life, Jamie had never stood a chance. But it was not the morning for such layman’s revelations.

What they came upon in the courtyard could only be described as a murder scene. The ratters were out that morning on the farthest corners of the grounds – thank God – and would have been driven to a frenzy by the calamity of feathers and bestial panic there.  
The bar of the chicken pen had been dug under, a whole three feet of stale earth, and the coop door pulled off its hinges. There, the murderer had left its larder in the egg boxes while it hurried back and forth to feed its successors their spoils. Before the lamp-lights had scared it away, anyway.  
Jamie turned half a chicken over with her foot, leaving blood on her shoe.

“Won’t be having eggs again, then,” she thought aloud.

Dani was standing with the two boys by the fencing.

“Bloody foxes,” one of them said. “I’ll wring her neck.”

Jamie approached carefully, eyeing the bloodbath. The other boy was running his finger over the wire.

“Olly . . .” Dani began, but his attention was elsewhere.

The older boy was still throwing a fit. He was the one that would get his hide tanned for it then, she supposed.

“You didn’t bury the stone in deep enough,” Jamie said. “No wonder they dug right under it.”

The boy turned on her.

“Oi, new kid,” he began. Oliver grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back. Dani, she did not fail to note, had held her arm in front of her. “You worry about in there and I’ll worry about here, alright? You’re not one of us.”

Jamie’s face looked stung. Before she could speak, Dani cut them both off, her arm still over the girl.

“She didn’t mean anything by it, okay? I’m sorry.”

The boy threw Olly off. It surprised Jamie that he took a moment to look her over – not to gauge her reaction so much as to see is she was alright. Perhaps he had worked with her father, or known at least that she would rather be working out there with the boys.  
Jamie reined herself in.  
Who was Olly then, she thought, and how was he friends with Dani?  
That was a story for another night, one in which she would unburden herself with the story of her father’s death as Jamie sat listening in the darkness. The boy mouthed an apology on behalf of his friend – who had stalked off like a hit dog – but Dani shook her head.

When she turned Jamie had half-expected to be reprimanded, but she only raised an eyebrow. “They really did not bury it deep enough,” she said. “Even I can see that.”  
A fox’s hide would no doubt be hanging on the stables the next day.

-

“Jamie?”  
The light panned up in the darkness. She heard her breath reverberate against the narrow walls.

“S’alright,” she called back. The dumbwaiter shunted down another foot. “Fuckin’ Christ,” she breathed, quietly enough not to alarm the girl. She swore she heard her murmur her name again.  
The dumbwaiter had not been working since that morning when the Wingraves’ youngest – Flora, she recalled – claimed to have not been playing again and was also the only one who knew it was broken.  
For all the grief it caused then, Dani had only smiled.  
But the latest edition to housekeeping had been the only one still small enough to fit inside the chamber, and had even offered in an effort to break the humdrum routine she had found herself fallen into. This was not what she had expected.

“Do you see it?” Dani asked, leaning over that minute precipice.  
Jamie felt the boards around her in vain. She bit down on her tongue to stop herself from cursing. “You can just come back up, don’t hurt yourself.”

Between all the ropes tied to the damn thing Jamie would not even know where to begin and opted instead to pull herself up without it.  
She took the cord as the dumbwaiter dropped.  
It hit the cellar floor with a thud, dropping through all three levels without a second thought and leaving her stomach behind with it. She pulled her hand to her chest with a gasp.

But amid the ringing in her head and the way her body had hit the ground, the only thing she could wonder was why the hell the thing had to reach the bottom of the cellar. Rich people and their booze, she swore.

Her hand was still bleeding and her hip had cracked on impact. It would feel like hell in the morning. Jamie turned.  
She wondered dimly that if she had broken her neck in the short, stiff fall, would they have buried her there in Bly? She had only been there a few days.  
Then again, look at how they had buried her mother, it was a wonder any of them might rest in peace.

A lantern in the cellar shattered. The girl froze.  
She stared, deer-like, into that tumultuous darkness, wondering how – if a simple lantern had taken a simple fallen from the echo – it was held in the hand of the drowned woman.  
She was stood facing the girl, her fingers around the shattered glass, a petrified relic older than the house itself. And her face – featureless – turned in anticipation of her arrival. It was as if she had been wandering those halls for a lifetime and a lifetime more waiting for that moment, for that body to fall from the sky like a miscarried detonation. She was a bird’s egg that had tumbled from the nest and she understood with every sinew in her body how it felt to have broken out before she was fully formed, not yet ready to bear the onslaught of rain.

The woman took a step towards her.  
Jamie wanted to scream. She thought she might, but animal instinct had made her body immobilize before rigor mortis had even murmured.

The glass broke underfoot.

And somewhere – thank God – somewhere between the woman’s languid non-breathing and the wild thumping of her heart, Jamie swallowed that fear alive and pulled herself up. And it hurt, Christ did it hurt, with her right hand to her chest and her breath cartwheeling, and there was not a thing in the world that could stop her from breaking through the top of the cage. Jamie hauled herself up the first foot of rope.  
The veins of the house were ancient, more ancient than she could ever know, and a creature so small and finite did not even need to fear to break them.  
Because that thing in the cellar could not be real and not exist beyond the periphery of dreaming and it was not going to get her that day. Jesus Christ, the girl would think all those years later, it had taken falling down three flights of stairs to realise she did not want to end up buried like her mother: that for the grief and strangeness surrounding her she was still something living even if she did not feel it. Her lungs expanded with internal promise.

Jamie was clear another foot.  
The lady’s hand had come round the corner to bridge the gap between them. She reached through the top of the dumbwaiter. Jamie pulled her knees up and if she grabbed her then, there were a thousand things known come morning were just nightmares that she would have to see in the light.

She hung onto the ropes, suspended between the flights, when the lady withdrew her hand. Beneath her – in the window of the broken panel – the woman turned her head and stared up at her with her blank, porcelain finish.  
That sight burned itself into the back of her mind and might have remained there forever if not for the fingers on her shoulder, a lightweight calling that pulled her up from her comatose blindness. Dani was reaching for her down in that darkness. What a blessed lifeline she saw.  
Jamie scratched for her with her torn hand, and the girl pulled her out with a surety that she did not know she had. They crawled out onto the red carpet runner. 

Her chest was crashing and rising and the stair lights blinded her. Dani was holding her up, wiping the blood off on her tights. She was saying something Jamie did not hear, moving forward to look down the shaft where the dumbwaiter sat empty and her light was abandoned.

“Are you alright?” The words broke through to her.

Jamie leant back. God, what a mess she had made. But Dani was only looking at her.

“Fine,” she said. “Just the fall.”

She rested her head on her knees for a moment.  
The girl took her hand where the rope had burned through it. “What happened down there? It felt like you were gone for hours.”

Jamie’s mouth was open a little. “Thought I saw a fox.”

Dani wrapped her hands over her arm to pull her to.

“Let’s get you cleaned up.”

She did not press her any further, not only because she felt horribly guilty about the whole thing (it had been her idea in the first place) but all the colour had drained from Jamie’s face. Some instinct took over in her mind and she led the girl downstairs with her touch on her upper arm as if it were the only thing keeping them both standing, what Jamie swore for half a moment might have been.

Her knees hit the kitchen chair.  
At least there was no one else about at that hour – shit, it was almost midnight. A quick job, Dani had promised her, she would be asleep by the hour.  
At least no one else had been there, she told herself again, the girl did not strike her as the type that would appreciate them seeing her in such a state. She did not even want Dani to see her then.

The girl took her time to clean her palm held upward without a word, like it was a blessing, like she was offering herself up the sky itself. When it was bandaged up Dani replaced it in her lap and tucked her hair out of her eyes. This seemed to wake Jamie with a murmur and she recoiled. “Thank you.”

She looked down at her hand.  
After a moment, Dani decided to go digging through Owen’s reserves – he would not notice a little bit missing – and took two clean glasses.

“Here, don’t tell anyone, though he only breaks it out with Mrs. Grose for Christmas anyway.”

Jamie took the glass up in a heartbeat. “Bourbon?” she asked.

Dani nodded. It was too sharp for her taste, she had only ever had a glass of wine before, but the other girl drained hers and she sensed that she had needed it.

“Are you sure you’re alright?”

Jamie screwed her eyes shut.

“I am so sorry – ”

“Don’t be, love, I weren’t gonna’ let you go climbing down there.”

“I know, but – ”

“I offered,” Jamie said, and although there was no malice in her words Dani felt that she had unanimously decided it was final.

And so why was Jamie protecting her and not the other way around, what the hell had happened down there she would not want to have subjected the girl to? A fall down the stairs, Dani reminded herself. Still, the brush with death had stunned her more than she would have believed. Perhaps there was more to her than that cold indifference she bore.

Dani reminded herself to be patient with the groundskeeper’s daughter. God only knew what she had been through before she arrived.

But the drink returned some colour to her cheeks and she was running her hands down her legs as if to steel herself.

“Right, I should be going them.”

“Oh,” Dani said. “Yeah, get some rest.”

“Only need a cigarette,” the girl huffed.

Dani had a half-smile but her eyes gave her away.

Outside, Jamie had a last smoke for the night, which finally stopped her hands from shaking. Why was she always trying to prove herself with those stupid stunts anyway? What would her brothers say? Chastise her, most like. Maybe Mikey would be too young to understand, crying his little heart out as he had that last time. Her hands had left bruises on his arms when they took him. Her chest crumpled.

Flicking the end of the light away, she went off to the stables for the night, the thought of the chicken coop weighing on her mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by that moment in hill house of course 
> 
> I’m fleshing out a lot more than the pairing I know but who’s the one reading this at the end of the chapter? 
> 
> I’m on tumblr @phoebe-fucking-bridgers come say hi


	4. Something in the Water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings: drugs, parental death, internalised homophobia, implications of abuse

August 7th, 1914

There were no mirrors in the housekeepers’ quarters.  
Only one of the younger girls kept a handheld mirror beneath her bed that she let a precious few use, but she was sweet on Eddie down in the village – who only had eyes for the young American – and so Dani resigned herself every morning to the old servants’ washroom.  
In all honesty, she did not mind that small ritual. The washroom had not been used in years, having no running water and the outhouse being much closer, and nobody else knew well enough about it to disturb her in those early hours.

And she could not stand the thought of a mirror being near where she slept. Not since her father passed away, not since she felt his eyes over her shoulder every morning.  
Dani brushed the cots out of her hair.  
He was not there that morning, and she wondered where he had got to. Gone off to follow her mother’s shadow for the day, perhaps, pulling on her heels as she forced herself out of bed to wait on the Lady of the house. Dani was not permitted to such duties and for that she felt – regrettably – grateful.  
God only knew she had enough grief of her own to carry around, she did not need that of her last blood relative’s too. When she grew older and would work in the nurseries for the midwives, she would swear a mother’s touch made colours on the skin of the children somehow – that they might pass on that taint of life with a brush of the hand – that much she knew. Maybe it was only her own, branding her with memories of a time that had passed, but she saw that look in the children’s eyes too. That they knew the sins of their parents before they came into the world.  
Dani was scrubbing at the skin of her hands.

She looked back into the glass and found that she was alone still.  
As it sometimes did, her own confidence surprised her. Her eyes passed over her shoulder, expecting him, daring him to come out and find her. There were many beasts hiding in the grounds at Bly, too many for her to name.  
And the girl knew her own heart in the way only such nervous creatures did.  
The first time, she recalled, the sea had been restless beneath her. And she had felt secure enough with her father’s hand on her shoulder, back before the time they had started shaking, when there was light in her mother’s eyes still and she would kiss her goodnight.  
But there had been ghosts then too, even if they were fewer. Some hauntings could be beloved.

When they had crossed that ocean years before, she had not yet known the why of it all. But there were friends of her mothers, good friends she had called them, that had spirited them away from the east coast before any embarrassment could set in. She had overheard the dining room conversation the night before, her mother had asked him why he had shot up all their money and she did not understand what it all meant.  
Only that they could not afford to live comfortably any more – a life Dani knew no differently from – and were to go across to England.  
‘If you want anything in this world,’ her mother had said, ‘you will have to work for it now.’

But her father was smiling at her from the ship’s railing. ‘It will be an adventure, kid.’  
He had let her have a drag from his cigarette. It tasted like the chimney smoke and sea salt. Even then, trepidation engulfing her, Dani had steadied herself against the ocean front.  
She was sick all night in the ship’s hold – purging herself of memories of the states and her nursery room in a haze – until inch by inch the seawater turned grey as they came closer to London.

For all she had suffered though, she had not seen a ghost since they had docked. Not until Bly when the housekeeper had shown them to their mirror-less quarters, and at the foot of her bed a not entirely unfamiliar figure came to see her again.

And when the years had wore on and her father shot the last of their inheritance in his veins for one final time, she knew she would never be alone again. Not with him looking over her.

For everything, all the hunger and turbulence of a grieving body, she could not help but think of it fondly. Her father had never left her at all. It is us.

“You alright?” the voice asked. “Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Dani raised her eyes. She was standing in the upper hallway, holding an armful of linen. When had she come up the stairs?

Miss. Taylor had risen – yet again – at dawn that morning, before Dani had woken with cold in her bones and blood in her mouth. She bit down on her tongue in her sleep out of courtesy to the rest of the servants, having been sure she would scream at the spectral figures wandering the place, or looking in at her from the windows for refuge. The scent of copper was malignant on the bedsheets.

“Fine, just forgot myself for a moment.”

Dani carried on down the way. Was it Friday already?

“How is the hand?” she asked.

“Fine,” Jamie shrugged. “Can still polish the cutlery.”

Dani briefly wondered if her mother had come through the kitchen for the silverware yet. Other than the food that was cooked and the china that was used for it, she knew very little about the Wingrave’s dinner service. That fell into the sphere of her mother, Mrs. Dudley, and Mrs. Grose. A girl as young as herself was to be kept in turn down and washing service until she was almost eighteen; until then she ran the underground duties of the Manor to save her mother the embarrassment of dirty nails.  
Her family might never have had the aristocracy of the Wingraves, but they had had their wealth (perhaps more than she ever would have believed) and that is what had saved the young, shining Americans in the end. Their name had become a ghost story on the lips of the east coast up-and-comers, beware the fate of opiates, but nobody back there ever did find out where they had disappeared off to. Squirreled away somewhere, leaving only the faint smell of morphine in their wake.

Miss. Clayton did not know what had come over her that morning either, only that it was some kind of starvation that reason could not have sated one way or another.

“Mr. Sharma, do you know if Mr. Wingrave still has the cigarettes on the mantelpiece he no longer smokes?”

“I should think so, why?” he said. Dani was already on her feet with the matchbox.

“If that is alright with you, may I take a minute?” she asked.

Mrs. Grose nodded, concern in her eyes. “As long as Miss. Wingrave is seen to before lunch go right ahead, my dear.”

Of course, Dani thought. She had left the bundle in the washrooms.

“Miss. Taylor?” she called. “Would you mind running these up to Miss. Wingrave’s room on the second floor?”

Jamie paused, her hands halfway to the clothes. She had seemed so eager to help until then, the girl noted, what had changed?

“Oh, I don’t know . . .”

“Third door on the left, sweetheart.” Mrs. Grose looked them over. “The one with the flowers.”

Jamie made to protest, but Dani looked more than a little tired around the eyes, and was still pale as a sheet from whatever had shaken her that morning.

“I don’t think – ”

Dani bridged the gap between them.

“Please? I won’t be gone a moment.”

Jamie held the bundle to her chest.

As the other girl closed in on the cigarette box, she wondered if she had been too short with the newcomer again. But her mind was still reeling from a restless night and the absence of her father glaring over her shoulder, and there would be time to make up for it later if she needed to.

The smoke rolled down to her lungs amicably. It was strange, how rarely these feelings overwhelmed her, no matter what it was, but it could not be denied. Sometimes she felt as if a hand was pulling her down into the water. Dani shivered against the cold.

“Didn’t think those belonged to you.”

She had smoked her way through half the pack and found them stale.

“Mrs. Grose did not mind it,” she told him, biting back something different. Miles Wingrave stood with his hands in his pockets.

At eleven years old, the first time she had seen him, Miles had started to lose some of his boyhood charm. He took to hunting with the village boys not long after, looking for rabbits or deer or whatever unfortunate soul happened to be on the other end of the rifle. And he was a good shot.  
At fifteen years old, he stood at least a foot taller than her.  
While she had an endless patience for the younger Wingrave children, she had found herself on the receiving end of Miles’ volatile mood far too many times to say the same for him. And so Dani did as Mrs. Grose said; she kept her head down, she stayed out of his way – especially when he was in a temper – and did everything she could not to make to scene. The year she had turned thirteen, however, he had begun to actively seek her out. Perhaps it was because she was getting older all of a sudden, not a child anymore but a young woman, growing into the natural beauty she would clearly become, that had him wandering the hallways until it was inevitable she should pass by.  
The first time he had laid a hand on her was poorly timed.  
Mrs. Grose had followed her up with a hand towel and caught the boy holding her arm, and if looks had killed Miles would long since have been buried along with the house’s foundations. And although she had threatened to tell Mrs. Wingrave herself if the boy crossed a line, Dani remained silent in the remaining years after for fear of a much darker secret spilling out. It was not until Jamie, in fact, that she even considered no longer taking it from the boy, but that incident was many months into the war.

To Dani, it simply felt as if Miles saw through a guise she did not even know she was wearing. As if he had weaselled through her smiles and her sincerity and glimpsed what cards she kept closest to her chest. The worst kinds of secrets, those were. Ones she herself was adamant could not belong to someone like her.  
And with a winning grin and sharp tongue – what chance did she stand against the next Lord Wingrave?

“Ought to be careful out this way, Miss Clayton,” he told her. “People are starting to get suspicious of foreigners, you know.”

He watched her with startling eyes. She could not bear it that day. Realising she had been gone for too long already, she rushed back to the small sanctuary of the kitchen and nearly steam-rolled Mr. Sharma in the process, who called after her to return the matches.

-

Miss. Taylor did not know how long she stood outside of Miss. Wingrave’s door for. Far too long, stupidly long, just to deliver her washing.  
But her hand was on the brass handle still. From the other side came another hymn of child’s laughter. She swore for half a moment the ghosts of Bly must have known she was listening. Her heart was thudding against her chest.

It was only a little girl, and older than her brother had been, older than he was, almost twice his age surely. She could hear the voice on the other side of the room, questioning. God, could they see her shadow under the doorway? Jamie instinctively shuffled back. Then a second voice emerged from the nursery and her stomach lurched.  
She told herself to get her shit together.

When she stepped inside, the sunlight seemed too bright for that time of day. Jamie turned away from the windows.

The girl looked up as if she had expected her – and God, Dani had told her she was sick but it was something else to see a child looking so irrevocably ill – and was followed by her mother, laying in the sickbed with her despite being dressed up for the day.

“Sorry,” Jamie said, before catching herself. “Sorry, ma’am.”

The pair hardly noticed the slip, too enamoured by a love possessed only by a mother and daughter. Jamie did not know before then that a body could turn to stone.

“What do we say?” the Lady Wingrave asked.

“Thank you,” Flora told her. She had a doll in her hands.

And Christ, Jamie did not know of a place where they thanked the help like that. All she could do was put the clothes stiffly on the ottoman and try to free herself from the solace she had become very much tangled up in.  
Only then the Lady Wingrave was up and out of bed calling to her, an ethereal light in her eyes as if she had not been born so much as she appeared overnight in the manor to drift from room to room with all the words of love on her tongue. She was a beautiful thing, the most beautiful thing Jamie could have imagined, perfumed with lavender and with the soft, ivory hands of a woman that had never had to work a day in her life.  
Jamie had seen her once or twice on the grounds before, moving between the real world and something unseen, something she could only think of as ‘other’, but up close she could not conceive how a soul could be confined to only one word: Charlotte.  
Jamie felt the unprecedented nerve to say it aloud, to take it between her inexperienced teeth with all the audacity and hopelessness of a childhood crush.

Instead, the Lady had her hand on her arm to bless her.  
“Doctor Montague will be here soon, would you mind asking for someone to fix him his drink, my darling?”  
Something hummed beneath her skin, golden and bright and sure to send her either into a fever or comatose. Oh, Jamie thought.  
The woman was holding her arm as if she were made of glass. Not her, who had trekked through miles of rain just to get there, her who was half-made and half-mad and more pain than human, that she might be worth something one day that deserved to be looked at like that. The Lady swept the curls from Jamie’s face like a doting mother might. Her heart began to seize in her chest.

“Of course, my Lady,” said a voice in the hallway. Jamie let out a breath as though she had been burned.

“Miss Clayton!” Flora called.

Dani offered her a smile. “So sorry for keeping you,” she told Jamie, who was long lost by then.

At that time Miss. Clayton thought she may have finally pieced the girl together. She had been grieving, that much she knew, and when she saw Mrs. Wingrave look at her in that way she did – how she looked at all the children that passed by – and how Jamie burned under the spotlight, she thought she had understood. So it was her mother that had passed away.

And she had been right, of course, but it was not that that had turned the girl inside out.  
Jamie did not sleep that night, her heart pounding like it did. Instead she waited for the coming cold with her own body a bonfire of fidelity for the woman: for Charlotte and her brown eyes, her hair, the lines around her mouth that only came about when she smiled, truly smiled.  
Jamie pinned that feeling close to her chest. It was dark and aflame and kicking out like a newborn that demanded to be heard. She smothered it. Because no one could know. Nobody could understand how the sea had crashed over her after years of standing in the rockpools, a sudden calamity that surrounded her with so much panic and love she thought that she might have screamed. And she wondered then how she could have ever lived on land.  
So much of herself had fallen into place. Jamie could not let them see that. Instead she strangled it beneath the bedsheet like an unwanted cat, or a fox that had broken into the chicken coop, until it finally stopped fighting. She laid her head on its body. The feeling of wrongness had not alleviated, though – only the smell of rot emanating in the air – a certainty that there was something perverse inside her, it was an organ out of place, and the history books were unspoken on the arrangements of her anatomy.

-

They did not visit the chapel often because the chapel was not a place to be visited. So old that even the records of it did not remain, it was by 1914 only a sad heirloom on the edge of the property that few would dare to visit.

When the girl stepped inside, there were candles burning at the altar. She could smell something beyond the damp of the grass: ancient enough it spoke a language they could no longer remember. More than anything, the ground felt holy. She was not sure if it was sacrilegious to cross the epithets on the floor or the names etched into them.  
The lady Lloyd she always skipped over, sure that the ferocious nature of the woman’s legacy would somehow infect her if she touched the stone. The book was open on the pew:  
So also you now indeed have sorrow; but I will see you again,  
and your heart shall rejoice; and your joy no man shall take from you.

A gentle thought, too human to be holy.  
Dani ran her fingers over the text before she recoiled. The last time she had been there, they had buried her father in the cemetery. She had not cried for him, and thought that maybe there was something wrong with her because of it.  
Mrs. Grose had found her there in the evening and saw how contented she seemed in her state of shock. The human body was an incredible thing. But too often it froze in its own headlights. She remembered that well.  
When her husband died, she may have died right there along with him; she rose in the morning and came down the stairs and started the water for tea, but it was not her body she saw doing that. Immobilised, she would have called it. And the girl was far too young to such things.

Dani did not know why she found herself there all those years later. It was not her mother, despite her rarely saying a word to her by then, more like a marionette puppet brought to life when they needed her to. It was not even Miles, even though he was getting worse recently and had taken to the woods when he knew she was out there.

“It is this place,” Mrs. Grose had said. “Such a strange house. It is like it exists on a different trajectory than the rest of the world. But it is not that. It is not even haunted. More that it is – ”

“So loud,” Dani said. “So loud for a place this quiet.”

“Yes my dear, too loud, especially at night. The house coming alive around us, remembering what lived there a hundred years ago. I have seen it happen to all the new ones. At first I thought it was just the change for them, until I realised, they all come here in grief, but they never leave with any.”

Dani’s insides quivered. What if, she had wondered, it was all collecting there like some great gravity well? If the parts of themselves they were leaving made them less than whole? Maybe it was a mercy. The house taking the things they could not bear to carry any longer.

“The first thing I remember about moving, about Bly really, is how the water tasted different.” Made her sick, even, it made all of them sick in the first few days. She had never known flu like it in her life. But the more water she drank, the more the fever cooled and then somewhere along the line, she realised that she was home for good.

“Owen said that,” Mrs. Grose had told her. “It’s as if there is something in the water.”

Dani stirred. Had she not heard that before, of what had pulled itself out of the lake and come dripping over the stairs? Jamie never did tell her what she had seen in the cellar that day. When she had pulled her out of the dumbwaiter, she had smelt like the bottom of the lake.

She looked outside the window. It was dark already. And Hannah, Hannah had left there years ago.

Dani fell asleep that night on the pew, if only for a few hours, before being unceremoniously awoken by the cold. She had no idea how long she had been there, it was still the middle of the night it seemed. And the candles had burned themselves out.  
The only warmth around her was a jacket draped over her, that did not belong to anyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so I know this chapter is a bit of a different pace than the first few but there’s a few things I wanted to hash out  
> fun drinking game: take a shot every time I use ‘perhaps’ 
> 
> thank you for the number of comments and kudos I’ve received!! they really make my day  
> I’m working again tomorrow but I’ll be @phoebe-fucking-bridgers on tumblr in the meantime 
> 
> stay safe <3


	5. Trust and Rely

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> smoking tw; sickness tw; emetophobia tw

August 7th, 1914

Flora Wingrave heard more in the house than anyone could have ever hoped to believe. There was a place that existed – between her skin and her bones – that the secrets of Bly had set themselves into. It was not just in the looks the housekeepers gave one another or the familiar smell of poison from her father’s study each night, but the sounds too buried in the walls for anyone else to think to listen to. Lying in her sick bed, the girl had lots of time to listen.

And what was she, but a silent companion for the trespassers of the millennia before that came moaning through the halls at night?  
These were not the pleasantries she reserved for the sleeping hours. In there she found a kind of entropy, a meandering almost, from some friend’s memory or another, like wading through lakewater in the summer. Her friends did not always intend to allow a voyeur into their memories. But even in the sick, strung years of life she had lived, Flora Wingrave had made many friends. From all exotic corners of the world that for the memory of the little girl at Bly they took the time to write to.

One of her earliest dreams was her favourite. Her mother’s childhood friend had come to visit and briefly pressed a kiss to her feverish head; that alone had turned the key in a gate she then saw had always been open. Flora skimmed through the zoetrope that had been inadvertently granted to her.

They were walking the grounds of Bly, not old enough yet to know how to be bashful, but it was still without a doubt home.  
Her body shivered in its unnerving limbo between waking and dreaming – something worse, dreaded by all animals of their heart, remembering was always worse. Then again, what should a child who was dying from the moment she was born be afraid of? There was not much more that could be taken away from her other than time. She slept a lot those days.

The hand that touched her forehead was cold as death. A maternal chill overcame her.

“Are you alright?” a young Charlotte Lloyd had asked her. Flora blinked in the sudden light. Her colours were slipping between her hands.  
This was not how the dream should go; God knew she had walked it enough times.

And then – too quiet to disturb the world – she felt the quilt being pulled up around her. Her insides lurched.

When she came back from that thankful blackness the girl was still there, the new girl, cleaning up the sick in the bedpan Flora did not remember making.

“Did Miss. Clayton ask you to come up here?” She held onto the corners of the bedsheet with a reverence.

The new housekeeper nodded without even looking up at her. Her temples burned where the young woman had checked her temperature.

“Would you like to have tea with me today?” She had perked up a little at the thought of it.

“Look, I’m not your nanny,” the newcomer said. “Go ask Dani instead.”

Even then, despite the sickliness in her own eyes and the flare of her skin, Flora could not help but soften towards the stranger, who so adamantly did not want to be her friend.

There was a sincerity to her that was so completely lacking to the rest of the world, even her own family. Her eyes shifted up to the girl in the sickbed then back again.  
The name of the American girl lay on her lips like the last taste of champagne. Flora felt herself overwhelmed by the instinct – too young still to understand the language settling down into Miss. Taylor’s shoulders each night.

Miss. Clayton, she had thought, Miss. Clayton would have stayed there all day if she had asked her, curled up on the rocking chair all night as Flora went off dreaming. And all the acts of service the young housekeeper performed were not only because she was told to but because she did love the girl too.

It was only in the last year or two she had even begun to take care of her, in which her mother seemed to press further and further into the noises of the house. Miss. Clayton had known them intimately by then. Something in the young woman’s eyes was greying, telling her of what noises the house made when it awoke. Flora shivered.

Her love for the young woman’s was that of a child’s on their first day of school, enamoured completely by their teacher and the wholeness of the world they presented before them. Because everything had an answer surely, God had his reasons.

“I don’t think the new housekeeper likes me,” she dared to tell her mother that night.

“Miss. Taylor?” Mrs. Wingrave was beneath the bedsheets with her.

“She did not want to have tea with me.” Her doe eyes were imploring.

“Well she must be very busy my darling, what with a whole manor to take care of.” She tucked her daughter’s hair behind her. “Perhaps you should add her to your dollhouse, then she will feel more at home.”

-

When she returned to sleep that night Jamie was alone in the two bed hayloft. She had not seen her father in days, let alone spoken to him, although she did not know what she might have even said. Would she have told him about Dani, about the dumbwaiter, about Mrs. Wingrave’s kindness or how her daughter had her eyes?   
Or was it all just residing guilt that she had fallen into a life of domesticity so easily it surprised herself? There was a time she would have been taken kicking and screaming rather than abandon whatever was left of her father’s shadow. And now she had slipped into it without a second thought.

Since then the girl had only shrunk further into herself, down to the delicate memory of something she had once been and could no longer name. She swept the hallways of the manor in silence. She prepared the bread in the morning on an empty stomach and a bad night’s sleep. Sometimes, she was asked to collect the eggs if the chickens were still waiting on the fox. And she watched Mrs. Wingrave fawn over the place from a self-taught distance. Only the children of heartbreak knew such restraint. She wanted to scream. She wanted to never speak again. In the end, she slept.

-

August 8th, 1914

There was a comfort in being the first person awake in the morning. Jamie washed and dressed herself in silence, noting that she was beginning to grow into her clothes a little better now.

Downstairs, the dogs were awoken by the smell of kitchen fires and had scattered about to pick up whatever the rain had not yet washed away. She stopped to scratch each one in turn, mostly grizzled terriers that were talented enough vermin control to be taken beating in the woods now and again. The small ritual was the only thing that remained of her work on the grounds and there was little she would not give to hang onto it. The dogs did not mind the attention either, not even at half five in the morning.

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” her father said.

Jamie turned. “Couldn’t sleep.” It was half-true, anyway.

“Right,” he said. “What time d’you start?”

“Half an hour.” She rocked on her feet. “Mind showin’ me some of the grounds?”

Her father had not said yes but not no either, so she fell into his familiar tracks as he made the morning rounds.  
The horses looked phantasmal in the pre-dawn air, billowing great clouds of frost in the thickness of the morning. It was stung with rotting hay and saddle leather. She ached to go out into the woods again. At least nobody would find her there. She was not bad with a gun either, her father had made sure of that, not holding any reservations of what it would be like bringing a young girl with him into the groundskeepers’ world.

“Want us to pitch a pavilion in the spring,” he nodded to the cricket field. “Plenty of year-round festivities, Mr. Dudley said, for the school kids and that.”

Jamie had buried her hands in her overcoat. She knew better than to wear her work shoes around the grounds.

“Known for its horses round here too, I heard, show-jumping and the like.”

Jamie bit her lip. They had set up for the show-jumpers in the summer prior, housed creatures she had never before seen, breeds she never would have heard of elsewhere, all the way from Italy even.

“Reckon I could do that with you?” She teetered on the tips of her feet. There was that look in her eyes – one he knew all too well – like her whole world depended on his answer at that moment.  
‘I worry about Jamie sometimes,’ he would tell her mother in the quiet nights when the children were asleep. Quiet nights were few and far between. ‘She has her heart on her sleeve, don’t you think, in her own way? Puts all her money on one horse and gets heartbroken when it never even leaves the gate.’ Her mother bristled at that. She never had considered her a creature to put her heart out there for anyone to see.

“Jamie,” he began, but he only stood there until he reached the end of his cigarette. Her eyes were gleaming. Jamie pulled her mouth to the side and looked down, nodding to herself. She would not cry in front of him though. That was reserved for blue nights and the dying.  
The girl took off in the direction they came. Without thinking about it she had come to the edge of the woodland, and was alone at last except for the first birdsong and the movement in the trees. She allowed herself to take a breath. The air was clean and oblivious and healed the wounds of her lungs.  
Daring to trail further, she passed an ancient brook set with a wooden crossing, the abandoned sett on a hillside, until she found the graves of the snowdrops that would come again in spring. She needed to head back. Only it was for the first time in days Jamie had finally found herself in that space that held no expectations of her presence, in which the earth could not care less is she slowly turned to bone and the moss ate at her ribs. There would be flowers there, come summer, twining round her skull like a crown. Jamie had her eyes screwed shut. She would have done anything to have stayed out there and let whatever it may be claim her.  
By the time she took off she was already late. Hopefully Dani would not mind it. In fact, when she found her sat there in the drawing room the American girl had not even realised that she was missing. Most of the time, that would have come as a relief to Jamie. Something did not sit right with her that morning. Dani’s eyes seemed a shade more grey than usual and it was not just from lack of sleep.

“Mornin’,” Jamie tried. Dani seemed to look through her.

“Oh,” she said. “Good morning.” She pulled herself to her feet. “Mrs. Grose needs us to start on the windows as soon as we’re done today, better get to it.”

“Right,” Jamie nodded. “You alright?”

“I’m fine,” Dani said, but she found herself caught in a siren stare from the other side of the room.

“You sure?” Jamie asked, uncomfortable herself in the breach of isolation she so easily fell into. Dani’s eyes moved over hers and the colour of them struck a memory into the stone walls of her psyche, of when she had been no older than four or five and her father had shown her sea glass on the beach.  
For a moment there, Dani had gone to tell her everything and pull her body out from under the weight so merciless, indulged herself in a moment of peace in thinking that no, she was not alone, nobody was ever really alone, until the shouts from the kitchen shook them from their slumber and they went back to the familiarity of movement.  
There were days in which getting out of bed could feel like being the first creature to walk on land. How much more of their primordial heaviness could they bear? These things were written in their own genetics.

If Jamie had seen that she had been crying that morning, she did not press it any further. And Dani was disappointed by that, that the girl had not shown more concern for her counter-part, and Dani chastised herself for thinking it to begin with (especially when she had taken to the drawing room specifically to avoid any maternal fretting from the kitchen). And the girl had stopped her in her tracks, had she not? Made sure to pan a lighthouse eye over to her body? Dani shuddered.

The morning passed in the drawn-out silence of window cleaning.  
Jamie took the wet cloth and Dani the dry, until their arms were burned and bloodless and not even the stone-faced – former – groundskeeper could continue without complaint.

“Christ, they really run you ragged in the house don’t they?” Jamie said.

“It is not all drinking tea and eating biscuits, you know.” Dani replied, six foot up the library windows.

“I should be so lucky.”

“Want to take a minute? Nobody will see us on the parapet for a smoke.”

Jamie looked her over, uncertain as ever. Her arms dropped to her sides by themselves, her body conceiting against the mindlessness of the chore. “Alright, then.”

Needless to say, Jamie had not expected the girl to smoke like she did. Even she did not breathe with that particular ravenousness, not even on the worst days. She thought about asking her if she was alright once again, but did not want Dani to think of her as a nuisance, or worse, prying.

“I may need you to go see Flora again today, she won’t take her medicine with bargaining about it first, and I don’t know if I have the heart for it today.”

Jamie wrung her hands, having finished her last cigarette. “I . . .”

“Only for the afternoon if that’s alright. Besides, Mrs. Wingrave was asking after you.”

There was an unfamiliar blush on her cheeks, she could feel it. Jamie inhaled a lungful of stale tobacco instead. Whatever Dani was smoking had not been worth paying for, but she thought better than to bring it up. “I don’t know . . .”

“That bad?” Dani asked, amused almost at the thought of the six-year-old having riled her up.

The sound of the library doors saved her for a short while.

“Ladies?” Mrs. Grose asked. Dani threw any evidence to the footpath below and returned to her post. Not that they minded the help smoking on the premises – it would be a stranger sight not to – she very much doubted they would appreciate them deciding on break times whenever they pleased.  
“What were you doing out on the parapet?” Mrs. Grose asked.

Jamie instinctively looked to the other girl. To her surprise, Dani answered with an unnatural steady confidence. “We thought we heard someone call from outside, wanted to check everyone was alright. Only hearing things, I think.”  
Jamie had her hands behind her back, compliant.

Mrs. Grose raised an eyebrow but no more came of it. “Well, the Lady Wingrave needs you.” She excused herself.  
Jamie looked over to her the moment she was gone, but the young woman only moved her hair from her eyes and went back to the window.  
She knew her luck had been drawn out long enough when Dani caught her wrist outside.

“Go up to the sickroom now, I’ll find you afterwards.” With a turn of the head she was already moving away. Jamie caught her arm sharper than she had intended.

“Would you – maybe – mind seeing to her instead, it’s just that I – with the kids I don’t really know what to do with ‘em.” Her heart was pounding in her chest. Dani pulled her grip away.

“I’m sure you’ll be alright.” She took the buckets up again.

“No, I can’t.” Jamie said. Her eyes were moving something frantic between Dani’s. “Please.”  
It had all come out a lot more ragged than she had expected. And the young American must not have seen the tears threatening to run from behind her eyes.

“There’s too much to do today,” she said. “I’m sorry, Jamie.”  
Only she stood still in the courtyard, resolute. This was the one thing, she thought, that she could no longer bear. Dani took a step back.  
“You can’t go running off again, there’s already too much to do. I know you want to be working outside with the boys, but you’re at Bly now. You mustn’t.”

Something fresh rose itself in Jamie’s chest, innate as it was resentful. It may have been the years of dealing with the treatment of the groundskeepers’ boys for doing what she loved, or that until then she had thought there was a part of Miss. Clayton that had understood a part of her. The memory of her baby brother’s eyes burned in the back of her mind, those of a sick child turned wild, the last time she had ever seen him. Or that her mother had died without telling her why after burdening her for years with degrading from the school boys and locals telling her she would end up no different from Louise Clemens. There were tears falling now, stinging her with salt. The last time she had seen her, Flora had asked her why she was leaving, and Jamie had had to run to the outside sink just to be sick. “I won’t.”

“You have to work,” Dani had a look in her eyes she had rarely before seen, a streak of naked indignation. In the blessed years that she knew her, Dani would always continue to surprise her. Her volatility was not something to be admired that day.  
“I know that you think that this isn’t – ”

“This isn’t work,” Jamie half-shouted, knowing already where she would be led. “This isn’t anything that matters.”

Her nails were making her palms bleed. Dani put the buckets down. No matter how fractured her breathing had been a moment before, nothing had prepared her for what was coming.  
A very real tremor ran up her spine. Christ, it was like being reamed out by a schoolteacher.

“This isn’t work to you?” Dani asked. “I do the washing and the steaming and the ironing. I mop the floors and dust the wardrobes and kill the mice in the pantry. And the laying up three times a day and the washing up after – God, all of it – the cutlery and the china and the ovens and the baking trays and the saucepans and the cake tins – who do you think does all of that? When the rest of them are drinking cocktails in the garden parties, who do you think is getting the blood out of Mrs. Wingraves shoes and cleaning up the sick from Flora’s bed when she’s ill? Waiting for doctor calls and nights up when she’s burning from the inside out? You’ve been here what, four days? I have had to get up every day for years to do four peoples’ work around here because nobody else will get up and do it. There’s a goddamn war breaking out now too. And you can’t go have tea with a little girl? That would be the best thing that happens to her all week.”  
The American let out a breath after it all. Jamie could taste the blood in her mouth. She had turned three shades paler than she was that morning.

“Dani . . .” Jamie breathed. The use of the first-name intimacy only seemed to run to the end of her tether though.

“Go run off back to the woods, Jamie, I’ll see to her.” Dani gave her one last glance at the door, the colour of her eyes replaced with what could only be exhaustion. “It’s fine, honestly.”  
She left Jamie standing in the middle of the courtyard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the girls are ~ spiralling ~ 
> 
> thank you for all the lovely feedback!! I’m tryna get more from my family about the manors and that they worked at without raising too many questions 
> 
> **also to clarify just in case taking the dogs beating means beating the bushes to flush out birds, pls don’t worry about the dogs - idk if that’s a regional word or not so just wanted yall to know** 
> 
> comments make my day!! and I tend to write a lot more after lmao, so pls feel free to let me know what you think <3 stay safe !!


	6. The Last Summer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: implied rape

August 9th, 1914

The service that morning was succeeded by a funeral. In the graveyard, a patch of nerines had been cut an hour before and the leaves were still weeping.  
When they rose after the early morning a silence had come down to swallow them whole. The village of Bly, curious as it was even in mourning, gathered around the road outside to witness the grieving family. Amidst all the news coming from abroad, most of them had not even heard that one of the eldest of their congregation had passed away. And so one of the school boys was sent out with his father’s straight razor to find some flowers.

At the edge of the churchyard, Dani stopped to examine the headstones – some a hundred years old – when a cat emerged through the thicket.

“So, what is it?” a voice asked.

She turned her head. A few of the village boys were watching her with expectant eyes.

“What do you mean?” she asked. To them – still – she was an outsider. Not just from the manor but an American too, so why did they always seem to approach her the way they did. Her mother told her she just had one of those faces. Open, perhaps, she was not one to walk about with her eyes closed like the sleepwalkers.

“What’s the word from London, surely the Wingraves must have heard first? Will we be going over to fight, then?”  
And back in time for dinner, they were so sure of it, fifteen years old and they had not even shot an air rifle let alone a human being. She wondered how Miles Wingrave felt about the upcoming conscription.

“I really don’t know, maybe ask one of the family.” She turned away from them. The wind had picked up and reminded her that the dress and cardigan she wore each week would no longer be enough. Up on the church roof, the cat was crossing the slate up towards the bell tower.

“Ought to be getting back soon,” her mother thought aloud.  
She was with a string of other woman so undisturbed by the thought of the funeral, while the rest of the village seemed to be bracing themselves for a landmark. Perhaps their guilt was the strongest pull of them all. Was there really such a thing as admiration for the living?

“I’ll meet you there, then,” Dani told her. Her mother watched her leave with her eyes bearing holes in her back.  
Treading over the fallen fence line, Dani passed the trees to the far side of the church ground. There the sounds of the human race were smothered by holy hands, the light scattered into a hundred pieces on the ground. She breathed a sigh of relief.  
For a while, the young woman meandered there between the brook and the headstones, counting the minutes she had before she needed to return. It was only lunch service that day and then back to the chapel before the afternoon was their own.  
A flash of the magpies in the trees made her turn. She was not alone there, the feeling sitting low in her chest, having surrounded her both since she left and somehow all at once.  
The girl was stood in her overcoat with her hair framing her face. She had her hands behind her back.

“Hi,” Jamie said. Dani met her eyes, the lines of her mouth frozen in place. Most of the staff had stayed on the grounds that day for service in the little stone chapel with Mrs. Grose; Dani and her mother were the only ones that ever went down to the village, the tradition having seemed too intimate to break through when they first arrived there.  
Hannah had invited her, of course, but if she spent her Sunday mornings there she was fairly certain she would never leave the end of the drive. And so it had been easy for her to assume the Taylors would be joining the rest of the staff that day. Had she come all the way out there just to see her?  
The girl held out the wildflowers, white and blue headed and still soft from the morning light.  
“Wanted to say I was sorry,” Jamie said, holding her gaze for longer than any time Dani had known her. “I didn’t mean that the work is not real work. Just not what I’m used to. It’s really bloody hard, actually. And . . . it’s just been a terrible time for us, really, and I was mad but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. Shouldn’t have taken it out on anyone, but especially not you. I don’t expect you to forgive me any time soon, but I figured since we’re workin’ together, I wanted you to know that I felt bad about how we left it. So . . . y’know . . .”  
She held the flowers out as far as she could. “If you wanna’ go back to callin’ me Jamie again, maybe I could go back to callin’ you Dani?”  
Her mouth was quivering.  
She took the flowers and held them to her chest. They smelt like a christening. “And I’ll do whatever you need of me in the house, ‘promise, just maybe not climbin’ in the dumbwaiters anytime soon.”

Dani’s eyes fell. “Thank you, for the flowers. You didn’t have to do that,” she said. “I’m sorry too. I should never have shouted at you like that. It’s not your fault the way things are. And I wish – I wish you could be out working with your dad like you want. Til’ then, though, you’re pretty good at cleaning windows.”

Jamie looked up from the ground. “Thanks, Dan.”

There was a stone sitting in her stomach. Nobody had called her that before.

“Do you want to walk back with me?”

“Alright,” Jamie said.

They went back by ways of the woods, where Dani showed her the shortcut over the cattle grid. The sheep in the field had gathered as they passed by, emerging from the mist turned gold beneath the weight of dawn. They stood calling out to them until Jamie at last got a response.

“I told ya’, I can speak sheep,” Jamie said.

“That sounded nothing like a sheep,” Dani told her.

“Never heard Welsh, have you?” She smiled, boyish and bright, and the world shifted its colours as they broke out across the track.  
“You know, one of the village lads was watching you out by the church. Standing by the baker.”

“Oh,” Dani said, deciding to focus instead on the cracks over the stonework. “That’s Eddie, he’s a friend of mine.”

“You sure?” Jamie asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be sure?” She stopped to smell the flowers again.

“He was just lookin’ pretty intently is all.” She was wringing her hands together again, and it took a moment for her to realise she was bashful about broaching the subject. They were girls of almost the same age, after all, but Jamie must have known that practically half the boys in the village had a crush on the bright-eyed American.

“He can be a little like that, sometimes, he means well, though. Why, do you like him?”

“No,” Jamie laughed at the thought of it, almost too much to not draw her attention.

Mrs. Grose was in the doorway as they arrived, cutting them off before either of them had the chance to say another word. “Go get ready, ladies, we’re already running late to serve,” she told them.

Dani pulled her mouth to one side, a nervous habit she had never grown out of.

“See ya’ in a bit,” Jamie said, already on her way.

Something tugged the chords of Dani’s forearm and begged her to follow, to reach after the girl with all the intensity of the day before when they had stood in the courtyard. But she was gone, and Dani was left alone in the cold morning with only the flowers left, that had begun to die the moment they were picked.

-

Jamie did not know how she had slept the night before. She had been unable to stop herself from crying the moment she climbed into the sheets in the early afternoon, even after her father had come back and hesitated to ask what she was doing there so soon.  
Instead, he had laid down in the damp and the cold, and his daughter had neither stopped nor roused until she heard his body too giving in the exhaustion of loss. Jamie had never seen her father cry before.  
It shook something very young inside her chest still, a foundation she then saw was made of sand and not stone. He was a private man of even fewer words than her, but if there was something to be said of his work it was that his love for his family was endless. It existed beyond the scale of years and material distance.  
Losing his youngest son – even his in name only – had loosened something tumultuous and violent he had not known he possessed. If love had no ending than neither did grief.  
Louise Clemens had disappeared down that road carrying the last lamplight he knew well enough to name. Reality did not exist beyond it, and therefore he did not have to grieve for it.

Jamie climbed into his bed with the bottle of whiskey and he drank like the dying. Her own tears had run dry by then, by the sound of him so inevitable in his pain, and the girl took it upon herself to wrap her arms around him until he gave in to the burdens of being a thing still breathing.  
Of all of his family, she was the most like him. That hot streak of rage – that was all Louise, even she knew that – but in the moments after, Jamie settled back into the bones of her paternal ancestry. Her anger she would still in her fists, containing it like a bird between her hands, and let herself be seen with a kind of tenderness reserved only for the time after.

And so when the sun had risen, she had not known what else to do other than follow in his footsteps. She worked methodically, religiously, and treated the space with all the reverence of a pilgrim. She learnt from those around her and picked up their minute habits without even knowing it, like hanging the tea towels above the boiler to warm, and cleaning the top shelves first to stop dust falling downward as they worked.  
From a distance, she observed the patterns of Charlotte – who grew more beautiful by the day – until the feeling inside of her could no longer be denied.  
The girl had even thought, scandalously, of professing her love to the woman one day, enamoured with all the sincerity of a child’s first crush, while the notions of true love were still something living. In the end, she said nothing at all.

She avoided the children at all costs, only picking up their toys after they had retired for the night, and serving their meals without a word.  
As for Dani, she seemed lighter in the days that followed. Her mother was working every day again and no longer spent all her time in bed. She even found her showing Jamie the fastest way around the washrooms one day. Jamie would not go so far as to say she had taken a shine to the young girl – not the way that Owen and Hannah had – but she seemed almost relieved that her daughter had somebody like her to talk to, let alone work beside.

They were outside taking the washing down when she decided to speak up, her voice shaking with the fragility of what was taboo. “Did you want to talk about what happened?” Dani asked. “Before you got here, I mean?”

Jamie had been knelt on the ground to scratch one of the ratters when she asked. She only went very still, her eyes on the space in front of her.

“You never have to say anything, if you don’t want to. But if you do need to get it off your chest, you know where I am. I won’t say anything to anyone.”

Jamie nodded and bit down on her tongue, but it was not until a week later that anything had come from the thought.  
The last of the summer sun was lost above the water, warming the earth in an unexpected, final daze before autumn had sunk its teeth. The two of them were counting swallows after the midday service. And the lake, Dani explained, was a place of great tragedy, the late Viola Lloyd having drowned herself and her unborn child in a fit of grief.  
“She found him tangled up with her sister, on her way to tell him she was expecting,” she said. “I wonder what that meant, tangled together. In the same bed, maybe.”

Jamie watched her with dark eyes. She wanted to ask what it was Dani thought it meant, with the sort of grey burdening of the seriousness of her youth, and how it was the girl had not known of any man’s intentions with her when Jamie herself could not recall a time she did not understand.  
There was no particular time she remembering having learnt about the intricacies of love, no place in which her mind had shifted from so much carelessness and innocence that she saw in the youngest children. She thought, years later, that it may have been from all the things they called her mother, and her in turn, or the stories they made up of the groundskeepers’ boys having their way with her when they went out shooting in the woods. Jamie had burned under the weight of those words.

‘It is because you possess something they want from you, and you’ll always hold it over them whether you want to or not,’ her mother had told her. Jamie swallowed the thought like a bad tonic. She did not want to know of those mechanisms of stranger men’s minds, she only wanted to be outdoors, alone, with the sun on her shoulders.

“I don’t know,” Jamie had said in the end. “Families were strange back then.”

Dani nodded, already lost in thought.

The lake water was nesh and the colour of leaves, the sticklebacks darting away from their shadows. Dani held up her pretty dress to stop it getting wet, while Jamie only rolled up her trousers without much care. She would be freezing at night anyway.  
The warblers disappeared into the reeds as they waded as far as they dared, half convinced the Lady Lloyd’s bones might snap under their feet. Or worse, her hollow spectre might rise from the pond and drag them under.

Dani shivered. When she turned and saw Jamie, the girl was watching the sky beneath her sunhat, one thousand shades of blue that day, but her eyes betrayed her. Her mouth was trembling and the last thread of her was broken.  
Whatever it was that made her think of her mother, it clung to her like a body hypothermic. Dani had already crossed the stretch of water to take her in her arms, her dress now victim to the crest and fall, but Jamie’s head was in her hands.  
She ran her fingers over her back and held onto her as the girl trembled beneath her, and they stood there for what might have been days, until Jamie wiped her face clean with the back of her hand and almost defensive of what she had done. Her body was streaked with sickly penitence, and she moved to cover the brands it left on her skin.  
Dani continued to hold her and murmur whatever she could think of to console the girl. It had not occurred to her until then that she was only a child, bearing the end of summer with the grief of her whole family to carry like a bag of bones.

She took her hand and led her back out of the water. They retrieved their shoes and socks from the bank without a word, one of them still pink from an exhaustive haunting that only a parent could pass down to them, the other at a loss for how small she had felt after the exorcism.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading so far!! and for almost hitting 1k, that’s awesome <3 
> 
> i hope you had a safe new year wherever you were and a good start to the month!


	7. The Prayer's Field

August 12th, 1914

The hillside, the head housekeeper had told her, was once a place for the village to gather. In the old days – the very old days – when they did not sleep at night for the premonitions carried in their lungs, when they did not draw water from the other village wells or let the sick venture beyond their doorways, they would gather at noon to sit among the meadow flowers, the priest stood to read to them that it was all in God’s plan: that the fear and the pain and the mortal wracking of their chests as they waited, that it was part of something greater than themselves somehow.

She wondered if they had been right. She wondered if they even had the mind to doubt at all. Dani passed over the field in silence. What had it been like those hundreds of years before, waging war on an invisible enemy? It seemed more like suicide.  
How they had sat under the sun, holding onto one another – was that how the village looked now? As they nervously awaited news from London that might change their lives?  
Perhaps it was God after all. When the bullet had entered the body of the Archduke all those miles away, it was perfectly in fitting of some unprecedented conciliation. By the end, it did not feel like it. It had felt more as if the human race had written itself a death sentence and whatever celestial being had not had a hand in it was only then a casual observer of their species’ endless capacity for violence.

The parish had called a meeting that day that the Lord Wingrave would be attending, and she knew she could not linger there for long, not that they ever saw much of the man themselves anyway.  
As the nights drew longer and colder, he only seemed to lock himself away in his study as if he were the one to bear the news of it for them all. No doubt there would be an empty bottle of cognac at his side. These violent delights, Dani thought emptily, there was no end in sight.

The village seemed quieter than usual, although perhaps it was the time of year, but even those she had thought of as familiar seemed to darken at the sight of the sky. She did not doubt that their sons would have talked about joining the war effort.  
Despite it being two years before conscription was underway, their voyeuristic nationalism had reached even the farthest corners of the empire.  
Her stomach sunk at the thought. For King and Country, the writing declared. The men there were children still.

Dani paused outside the bakery doors. An elderly woman, assuming it was to let her by first, thanked her for her kindness. Dani smiled back but it did not feel like anything.

“Good morning,” she called as she stepped inside.

She steeled herself for whoever was on the other side, but it was only Mr. O’Mara: ‘the father,’ her mother called him. Dani wished that she saw the people there as anything other than an extension of herself.  
After all, they had lived their whole lives in colours she did not even know, they were alive long before they had children of their own. Had the gentleman always baked, had his mother shown him how, a grandparent, what had his father done, what had he died of?

“Good morning, Danielle.” He nodded politely. “They keeping you busy up there?”

“Yes, sir.”

He began to wrap up the bag for her. “You really must come for dinner sometime, Eddie would love that, Judy too, it’s been years since you last did.”

“Afraid most of my evenings I have to work, sir, but that’s very kind of you. Mrs. O’Mara’s a wonderful cook.”

Dani could not help it if the guilt crept up on her. She had used to spend much more time there, yes, but that was back when they had only just moved to Bly, and her mother was working enough for the three of them, and had insisted her daughter take them up on the offer while she still had the chance.  
There were only three rooms of the floor above them but what they had made of the place; Mrs. O’Mara stood washing the baby in the sink, Dani and Eddie stringing runner beans at the kitchen table, that summer had been the last she had ever felt like a child still.  
Green as grass and so certain of the world and its intentions for her. Thinking back on it, she wished she had spent the time with her father instead.  
She had taken whatever family she could get, she always had.  
Dani wished the man a pleasant afternoon and took her leave. A few gentlemen were stood outside the church to have a smoke: they did not seem the type to come from Bly though, perhaps they were up from London.  
She wondered if Henry Wingrave and his right hand man might be returning anytime soon. Surely the village did not have so much intrigue as to keep them there as long as it had.

The girl had made it to the kiss-gate when the school bell rang. She had spent too long lingering at the prayer’s field. It was inevitable Eddie would have to pass her on the way up.

Before she had the time to ruminate on the thought, he was ahead of her, smiling already and a little sheepish even in her presence. Despite herself, she greeted him with all the warmth of an old friend, and conceited when he insisted on walking her up to the manor. The school boys seemed to grow taller every day.

“How have you been?” she asked to fill the silence. The boy did not hold back from telling her every mundane detail of the last week or two, with school work and his father’s business, and Dani found herself nodding along without being able to pay much mind to it. It had been too long she had felt that way, though.

“So what do you make of it all?” he asked her. Dani came to a stop.

“Of what?” The cold had caused a blush over her cheeks. But he only laughed and shook his head, as if there was not a thing about her he did not find endearing.

“The Germans, in Belgium? I hear the soldiers down south have already been shipped off.”

“I don’t really know if it’s for me to make anything of,” Dani said. He furrowed his brow.

“It’s a good thing the men will do there, to protect us.”

Dani looked across at him. “Have you thought about enlisting?”

“I’m far too young for that,” he smiled. “Besides, I need to stay here, in Bly.”

Eddie pushed his glasses up in a way she was sure she ought to have fawned over. She looked down at her feet instead.

“What do you think you might do, when you’re older I mean?” He sounded sincere about it, too.  
Over the last year something had shifted. He had been her best friend, her only friend really, that she had had as a child, but it was becoming clear that as time had passed he thought of her far more than she thought of him. And she had felt terrible about it, for a while, for the complete lack of that presence she seemed to have in whatever space between her heart and mind that it was supposed to occupy.  
But as time wore on, she had had to spend more of her life working as her mother slipped away and less in the village, and she found one day that she had not only forgiven herself for her shortcoming but knew that she was more than content to live her life without any resistance from it at all.  
Many of the other girls up there, she had heard, said that they felt too young still to settle down yet and carry children. Dani had felt as if she drifted the other way. She swore that after a day’s work she was far too cold and too world-weary to even bear being in the presence of another, let alone one that was so painfully cloying for her attention. God, she thought, what she would not give to get away from it all for just a day.

-

After twenty years at Bly Manor, there was not much that could happen between the walls there that she did not know about. Hannah Grose had stepped into her title with all the grace of a soul born from the house itself, not only in the day-to-day running of the help but the mediation she performed between the people living in it.  
A house, she had discovered, was much like a body itself. If all of its parts were not running properly, the whole being would fall apart. Owen spoke much the same way of the kitchen; every wheel turning in the same direction at the same time for it to function, but when it did it was a thing to be marvelled at.  
In her first few weeks there, she had applied much the same thought to the machinery of the household. She knew to watch, to listen, to the way the Lady held her hands together one morning, or the tone of one of the housekeepers stretched too thin. She was an avid reader.

And so the woman knew that Owen had been quieter than usual, given the anniversary of his mother’s death, and that he was seeking anything to keep him working later at night, and she gave it to him in spades.  
She knew that Charlotte missed her husband, and wondered if it was some fault of her own that he had kept himself locked away; that Flora knew more about the goings on in the place from her sickbed than should have been possible; that the groundskeepers were anxious about the lengthening winters; that there was something wrong with Dani, and more sinister yet she taken it upon herself to keep private that particular haunting; that the Taylors were still heavy in a state of grief that only time could see them through. As for the oldest of the Wingrave children, Hannah had no words for him.

He had been standing at the top of the staircase with his hands in his pockets. Mrs. Grose met his gaze and the terrible emptiness with which it shone down on her.

“It is a pleasant afternoon, Mrs. Grose,” he told her. He took a step lower.

“Indeed, Master Miles.”

“Some friends in the village were thinking of going shooting, do you know might be free to be picker-up for us? We’ll pay them handsomely, of course.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Dudley would know more on that.” She pulled away from the banister.

“Do you know where Miss. Clayton might be at this hour, at all? She seems to spend an awful lot of time cooped up in here, the fresh air might do her well.”

Hannah had tried to keep a smile for the sake of amicability but the corners of her mouth betrayed her. Miles only stood a foot away from her, at the end of her eye line. “Afraid I don’t know that, either.”

He frowned, “Thought you were in charge of the girl. Not to worry.” Hannah paused. “What about the other one, who follows her around the place? Is she tending to Flora?”

The woman had a grip on his arm. She would have been as controlled and contained as she always was, if not for the shaking in her hand. What could be said that he did not already know?  
Do not touch them, do not look at them, do not take them out to the woods at the mercy of a young man’s trigger finger?  
But something in her body trembled, and the boy had felt it too, and pulled away from her as though it wounded him to even be standing there.

“Mrs. Grose?” Charlotte smiled to her from the doorway. “Might I borrow you a moment?”

“Of course, ma’am,” Hannah said, pressing down her skirts as if her body did not shiver beneath her skin.

“Oh, Miles, you do look splendid in red.” His mother turned on her heels.  
“Is everything alright?” Charlotte asked her when she stepped inside. “You look as if you have seen a ghost.”

“Of course, I just forgot myself for a moment.” She closed the bedroom door behind her.

Charlotte had laid out her dresses on the bed, all blues and blacks and whites. The woman knew what colours suited her.

“Would you like me to send for one of the girls?”

“No, not at all. I must imagine they are far too busy already,” Charlotte assured her. Of course they were busy, their work seemed to have no end. Half of them were in the kitchen already, given that they were a cook down, and she had sent Miss. Taylor and Miss. Clayton to tend to the rest of pastoral work alone since she did not believe the kitchens to be any place that day for the way they had been feeling. If anything, the heat only seemed to exacerbate them all.  
“I wonder how those will look on Isabel someday.” She ran her hand over the fabric with a twitch.  
Not Flora, Hannah thought, although the poor thing had lived longer than any doctor had prescribed her. “I only meant to ask you how the new starters are finding their feet; I do not check on the staff as I would like but am afraid it falls out of my wheelhouse.” Charlotte had taken one of her hands.  
Soft as a newborn’s, Hannah felt, not a day of work on her. But there was grief in her eyes.

“Well, I hear good things from Mr. Dudley, and Miss. Taylor is getting along well. We cannot deny her working spirit, despite her age.” Hannah told her. There was more behind her words but it was not for her to say: that she had seemed only half-living the morning she arrived, that she barely spoke a word to anyone, and her friendship with Miss. Clayton, albeit brief, had seemed – for lack of a better word – intense.

They spoke to one another as if they known that friendship their entire lives. On the occasions Hannah had caught them talking lowly, it was as if they reminisced about a time together they had had, long before they were born, before any of them, and they had found in the other one that at last remembered. There were times she had almost apologised for the intrusion. It was without a doubt that they had lifetimes inside of them; words they had forgotten ever learning.

“She is a sweet thing, isn’t she, under it all?” the Lady Wingrave smiled. Hannah pulled her hands away. “She brought me flowers from the village yesterday.”  
Charlotte was still staring down at the bed, until Hannah took a seat beside her. “She has lost her mother recently, hasn’t she?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I think more than anything, what she needs now is family.” She followed her gaze to the grandfather clock. “Although I believe Flora is out with her now, she seems quite taken with her, would you mind rescuing her so she might have a moment to breathe?” 

Hannah smiled. “Of course, ma’am.”  
She left the Lady to her room, where her body drifted closer to the wildflowers on the vanity. The thought of it could not be denied, even if she never spoke of it, even if the memories of rose gardens and childhood friends were forgotten in their histories: a crush. She kept that memento for two weeks, in a vase half-full, like a relic of a time she had never managed to move on from. There was an innocence to a childhood crush that did not demand explanation. She could only hope to remember such a time. 

-

When Flora Wingrave found out that the newest housekeeper had barely even seen the estate, she knew that she simply must take her on a tour of the grounds. She had awoken that morning with an uncharacteristic strength in her body, and had bathed and eaten breakfast by ten o’clock. Miss. Taylor had come to help dry her hair and get her dressed.  
Flora asked her about dreams first, and then memories, especially those of other people – but the way she had spoken of them as if they were her own had thrown the young woman – and then too their earliest.

“Oh, it was my birthday I think. When I was three.”

“And what happened?” Flora asked her.

“Well, my mum wasn’t around but my dad didn’t work that afternoon so that he could show me all the show-jumpers he was working with, and he let me sit on one.” Jamie furrowed her brow in concentration.  
The youngest of the Wingraves, it seemed, had a way of wearing people down. In the end, Jamie had found it easier just to placate her many questions.

“And what month is your birthday? Mine’s in February.”

“It’s this month. Why?” Jamie began working on her shoelaces.

“So we can do something to celebrate! It would be splendid.”

“Don’t imagine they’d give me the time for that, Miss. Wingrave, but it’s a charmin’ thought. You ready now?” Flora took her hand to lead her around the statue garden.

She asked her the names of each flower, even those she knew, only to listen to Jamie talk about them with such fervour, such love. She had promised to make garlands with her in the summer, but God only knew how long she would be working there for.  
And all the grief in her heart she had for her little brother, torn anew by the young girl, it had come to haunt them in the early hours of the morning. Her father still cried at night and did not speak a word the next day. Jamie still crawled into his bed to lay there and cry beside him.  
But each morning, the sun still rose. And she had found in that sacred, white light, that she could pretend for the Wingrave girl that those were her last days with Mikey instead, and found herself stepping afresh with all the devotion and adoration in the world. And Flora could only thank God for that time.

She showed her the chapel and the lake, the woods and the cricket field, the place where her brother taught her to whistle through a reed, the place her sister swore she would one day get married.

“Your sister?” Jamie asked. One hand in her own, Flora pulled her over to count the rabbits darting from the warrens.

“Isabel,” Flora told her. “She’s splendid. Only, she’s away at the moment at a boarding school, but she will be home in time for Christmas, it feels so far away still. She must be almost your age, too, and she’s very pretty. Almost as pretty as Dani.”

“Oh,” Jamie said, tongue-tied.

“Do you think Dani’s pretty? She talks a little differently, I know, but that’s because she’s not from around here.”

“Well, I . . .” Thankfully, Flora had only paused to take a breath.

“She thinks you’re pretty too,” the girl said. Jamie burned at the end of her hand. “She told me that when you first arrived, but I knew you would be.”

God, she mused, how did the girls thoughts move so quickly? Jamie did not hear what she said next, her mind was still trying to understand what Dani had told her.

They stopped at the foot of the woods. “Flora?” a voice called.

Jamie turned as if she were caught pick-pocketing.

“Mrs. Grose!” The girl ran over the leaves.

“You know, you really must stop stealing my girls away from me, that’s the second this month,” Hannah told her. “And your dinner is coming soon, so let’s get you washed up.”

Jamie reached to push her hair back from the fluster.

“Owen says he will need you tonight, dear,” Mrs. Grose said.

“Right, of course, I should be getting back.”

“Not to worry, you’ve been taking care of this one all day. We have thirty minutes before we begin, anyway.”

“Right,” the young woman nodded. She did not know what it was that had unsettled her, perhaps because it had not even felt like work that she was sure to be reprimanded, perhaps because it had seemed so much like Mikey in her hand instead. Jamie shivered at the thought.

“Will I see you tomorrow?” Flora asked her.

“Reckon you might,” Jamie said.

By the time she had seen them off, it was dark already. The sky had settled above the trees into a colour that was ancient, the pines ghastly in the air, the ground tinged with smoke.

Jamie crossed over to the edge of the boundary. There, the iron fencing had been left to the infestation of tamarick. The headstones, small around the fallen cedar and rotting conkers, could only have been that of a pet cemetery, she hoped anyway. Jamie lit a cigarette and sat down on the dead tree.

It was a nice place, she thought, if a little morbid, which is why the people stayed away from it. That was what she had enjoyed about the night, the quiet of it. One last breath before the turbulence and quarantine of the kitchen.

She snubbed the cigarette out on a stone greyhound, apologising to its memory. The young woman had never been asked before if she believed in ghosts. Most of the people she knew had decided that if they did exist, it was because they lived in the realm of God. Jamie did not know if she believed in that either.  
In the end, she only sat waiting for the dark to swallow her completely, until she could leave it no longer and made back for the house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you’re all staying safe!!   
> Please feel free to chat, here or on tumbo @ phoebe-fucking-bridgers <3


	8. Autumn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> parental issues tw; injury tw (not self harm but mentions of the feeling of clothes over a wound so watch out); dissociation tw

August 14th, 1914

They suppose it should come as no surprise that they would return to Bly. Certainly memories of such were still golden in their mind – like the expectation of morning – but they felt no grief to think back to such a time.  
In the state they were left in, there was no feeling or unfeeling, only a thought that crossed their mind that it should. The first time it had happened, when they rose the light passed through them in a way it never had before and they recalled that they had died.

They could still feel the edges of their skin – an outline drawn on the back page of a book – that seemed to carry them across the ground without their demanded it. Where had they been before that? Curled over his fragile body as the fear came whistling down from the sky, so certain they could protect him with all the movements of the religious.  
It had not hurt in the end. Not in the way that might have expected. The pain did pass, but the fingers curled over his arms as their flesh collided with its mortality, that was what would haunt the generations born from him.

At least in that time of the after, the evocation of memory could be so non-violent. Nothing to write home about, they thought dully. Thinking still existed, then, if only in the sphere in which they had died. They could not learn a new language or visit their grandchildren’s grandchildren in their post-life, but they could move freely as they pleased – regardless of distance – in the horizons between which they had lived.

The ghost had never had children to visit anyway. In life, they had not sought the comfort of uniformity as the other’s might, and took their time instead to forge out friendships and the silent gazes of what they held dearest. That was what family meant to them, even after they had died.

Bly was not the first place they had seen. Although, if they were being honest, they had died with the assumption that nothing else was to come. Not like the other bodies ending with clenched fists for the coming commandment.

But the woods were pleasant when they emerged, dripping with yellow light. And from there they remembered yellow and the trees, and the wrens skittering through what had fallen. A child was crying.  
The ghost turned to follow the sound. It was not their own birth that they might witness, but it was one of the family’s. They stood there as long as they dared among the distant smell of the forest floor.  
Colchester, they mused. The first thing they had come back to was the village outside of Colchester where their family stayed for almost a year. Perhaps because it existed in their mind as neither a good or bad time, and there was a blessed ambiguity to their life spent there. Too young to work but too poor to school.  
And so they stood on the Colchester road with the afterbirth buried beneath an oak. There were acorns still growing above them.

And here they were now, back in Bly. The earth was stiff as a body underfoot and they pulled on their jacket – a mortal habit that never did break.

The dogs were awake and scenting about already, more than likely roused by the kitchen cooks busy at work. From the back doors the head housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, emptied out the mop buckets and drew her coat around her. It did look cold that morning.  
Then the spectre itself turned north to round over the woods and hear the grass growing from the fields. There, they stood at the pet cemetery. It was buried away from the main ground and thankful of the fact, as since the groundskeeper’s daughter had begun tending to it in 1914, it was solace for the living and the dead.

They were not the only one to be at Bly Manor, either.

The Lady that drew herself from the lake water was always there somewhere: scaring the living silly with her mindless circling of the rooms. Even she had forgotten what she was out there looking for. And she was so adamant it might be found at the bottom of the cellar.

But the ghost itself had barely held onto its own identity, and had gladly shrugged the need for name or title as long as they had those other things to hold onto. Doubtless that their journey through would send them mad, they had hung their coat up willingly.  
And so that was what they owned by then, half a face, a jacket still too big for them, and some recognition of what was Bly. The colour of their eyes remained even if they looked a little hollow.  
Unlike the Lady who had entangled herself in memoriam to the manor’s gravity. She never did leave and she never would. Some things had too much grief for that.

How strange, the ghost thought, that they should hold onto the honour of being a lady when they were not even alive. Those things had mattered more a few hundred years before, they assumed. Or they had only been quick to give any semblance of being human when the time came. Then again, they had never felt quite like living anyway.

“Didn’t have the heart for it,” they mumbled out loud. They could have spent the rest of their hours there in the dog’s garden, but they had a housekeeper to see.

-

Dani did not know where her mother was that day. By the time she had returned from the servant’s room, her bed was empty and re-made, and she had not wanted to bother the other girls with her questions.

Instead, she went upstairs to give the rooms a once over before Mrs. Grose made her rounds. Henry Wingrave and his associate had left the night before – no skin off her nose, she thought, it meant two less rooms to upkeep and Mr. Quint stared too much for her liking.  
Still, the presence in his room had given her pause. The beds were stripped, the curtains aired and washing baskets empty, and at any other time she would have sworn the room was still in use. Dani looked over her shoulder. There were not even her father’s eyes in the mirror to watch over her. She shuddered and blamed it on a lack of sleep.

Down in the wash rooms, they had no time to waste. Her shoulders were already tense, the weight of the endless list of jobs they needed doing bearing down on her, too much for a girl her age but she felt it regardless.  
That was where she found her mother pulling in the lines. The water beneath her seethed with a generous dose of steam.

“Danielle,” she said when she saw her standing there.

Dani emptied out the linen to be washed. “I’m only here to iron, I won’t get in your way.”

The girl tried putting herself out of sight but her mother seemed adamant to find work around her. “Did you sleep well?” Her mother nodded. She looked as if she had not slept in years.

“And you?” Her forearms were red in the water.

Dani hummed unconvincingly. The girl had managed to snatch a few hours – between a trespasser visit and memories of her father – but it was hardly enough. Her hands shook as she flipped the linen.

“It’s so sad, about those boys.” Her mother was looking across the basin with her hands submerged. “Being sent off to fight like that, not knowing if they’ll ever see their mothers again.”

Her daughter watched her from across the way. News had reached the manor more than a week before, why was she only talking about it now? A sort of sense of dread crept up on the girl, had her mother ever wanted a son, were those the words she was ready to drop on her daughter’s day as she had done countless times before, completely oblivious of the cracks she caused in the ground she crossed? What was Dani ever better for than a handwritten letter for her most cutting thoughts?

“It pains you to see,” her mother concluded.

Dani looked back at her work before she burned herself. It would not be the first time.   
Perhaps what upset her most about her mother was that she never knew quite where she stood with her. To her, Dani was either an absent child or the kindest soul she knew, some good to finally come of the family or a distraction to the working men, and there was no way of her knowing what would come out of her mouth next.  
Most of the time she only agreed with her for the sake of ease. She loved her in the way that fourteen-year-old girls loved their mothers, with a hot streak of rage.

“Have you spoken to Edmund at all recently?”

Her stomach turned at the sound. “Yes, I saw him the day before last.”

“Such a good young man. And a hard-working family, running a place like that. I do wish you would consider marrying him. The fact he would be willing to despite everything . . .”  
Her mother gestured about her as if the ailments she had diagnosed of their genetic predisposition could be seen. Her eyes did not meet her once.

“I have . . . never said I would not consider it,” Dani said with greater bravery than she felt. Her mouth had twisted to the side.

“You do not look as if you would.”

“Well, we are only fourteen, it is still young.”

Her mother raised her eyes. “I was married a year later.”

There were a hundred things Dani could have said back to her, but in all her life she had never had the heart for juvenile cruelty.  
When her work was done she took off with a renewed passion to be anywhere else in the house.

In the kitchen, the cooks were shouting out orders at the speed of light and so Dani hurried to the sinks without a word.

“Roasting tins, please!” a voice shouted from the other room. Dani had to scramble to get them dry.

Mr. Sharma did not say a word to her, only gave her shoulder a momentary grip, perhaps from the lack of colour on her face.

“Roasting tins!” a second voice called.

“Will be thirty seconds,” she shouted back.

Timings, timings, Owen had taught her. When they had a hundred things to juggle and four ovens to cook them in, telling the kitchen they would be there soon was not entirely helpful.

Dani slid them to the cold side. “Right behind you.”  
It was never a good idea to position herself in the middle of the kitchen at the busiest of times, and anyone who needed telling that was usually delivered swiftly with such.

Miss. Taylor joined her not long after – Mrs. Grose had been putting her to work with other chores the more she grew used to housekeeping.

“Busy mornin’, I take it?” She rolled her sleeves up without missing a beat.

“Where the fuck did you put the steel?” somebody shouted from afar. Dani raised an eyebrow at her.

“Would you mind taking over washing for now? I promise it won’t be for all morning.”

“’Course,” Jamie said.

Dani’s hands were blistered beyond repair.

“Christ, you alright?”

Dani only nodded and dried off on a hand towel. Her skin seethed from the contact.

After a moment or two, she managed to locate the steel from a cooling rack but could not recall why on earth she had thought to leave it there.

“Why wasn’t it with the knives?” the cook demanded. “Don’t let the new one do that again when it’s a Friday of all days.”

She felt a pang in her stomach. From the corner of her eye, she saw Owen zeroing in on them should the need arise.

“It wasn’t her, I did that.” Her lines of her expression darkened.

“Oh,” the cook said. “Everything alright, then?”

Dani shook her head. God, maybe she was more tired than she realised. “Won’t happen again,” she excused herself. Jamie was up to her elbows in dishwater when she returned.

“Did ya’ find whatever it was?”

“Yeah, I just . . . the cooks can get angry and I flustered a bit.” Dani fought to explain.

“Want me to sort ‘em out for you? ‘Cus I will.” She wore her crooked grin again.

Dani huffed with laughter and unfolded her arms. “The one with the carving knife?”

“Three on one, I can take those odds.” Jamie stopped a moment to lean from the sinks.

“I think you could beat them, might take some time, though.”

“One day at a time, I reckon.”

-

The old courtyard was covered in a fine frost by the evening. A couple of the groundskeeper’s boys had been out there all day entrenching in the first field, and were still bickering when she came past.

“How many of you does it take to build a chicken coop?” she asked.

Olly raised his head at her. “I don’t know, not as many as it takes to catch a fox.”

“Still out there?”

The other boy, Will, was muttering under his breath. Always had a temper, that one. “Well, have a good night.”

“You too, Miss. Clayton.”

She heard Olly hit him on the arm as she crossed the way. Under her sleeves, her skin prickled, every movement the cotton made itching at the edge of a furnace. She would be burning up before the sun came down.  
But this was not a day she would allow to pass without commemoration.  
She found the groundskeeper’s daughter in the woods, not far from the estate boundary. Her hands were in the overcoat’s pockets and she had a set look on her face as usual.

Dani recalled the weight of the jacket the first day she had taken it from her, the smell of the earth it carried.

“You ever gonna’ grow into that thing?” Dani asked. She took a seat on one of the stone edges in the glade.

Jamie looked down at where the overcoat fell to her knees and shrugged. “Well, it was my dad’s.”  
The wind blew her hair out of her eyes.

Although it would be two days more before her grief in the lake’s water consumed her, the silence that settled between the two of them had already become unburdened, unpresumptuous.

“What’re you doin’ out here, then?” Jamie ran her boot heel across the ground. Sometimes in the outwoods she swore she stood there more like a ghost than something breathing.  
That was what grief did to the young, she knew that all too well, made them curl and decay while those around them demanded they fight for their lives; and ultimately, the creature that survived it could never go back to what it once was. They were nostalgic, and mortal, and organic, and when they returned to the ground something might grow to take their places. Something better than her, Jamie thought. And that was what she would never cease to choose over their many kingdoms of heaven.

“Looking for you.”

Those empty eyes of hers were wary. Dani cracked a smile. It was like cornering a street cat to try give it a better home.

“Flora told me it was your birthday, so,” she fished into her pocket, “it’s not much, but I had to do something to mark the occasion.”

The young housekeeper held out the brown paper package. Jamie, incredulous, only continued to watch her.

“Go ahead, open it, before we catch a chill.”

Her hands seemed to pale when they made contact.

“Dani . . .”

“Oh, Flora made it for you. I’m sorry I couldn’t afford something from the village.”

“You really didn’t have to do this.” She turned it over in her hands and remained there a good minute or two.

“What’s wrong?” Dani frowned.

“Nothin’, I just . . . nobody’s ever gotten me anything before, other than my family y’know.” Dani patted the rock ledge next to her. “So, thank you, is what I’m – ” she cut herself off.  
Inside the paper was a black, woven talisman made of string. It sat skinny and featureless in the young woman’s hand.

“It’s to keep you safe, it’s meant to anyway, she insisted on everyone having one. So, it’s her you should be thanking really.”

Jamie held onto the talisman as if it were her own heart. “This is the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

Dani leant forward and kissed her on the cheek. The heat of her skin rose there, a brand of her incurable affection.  
Jamie could hear the blood pounding in her mouth. Other than that, she thought to herself. The young American had gotten to her feet. A chill passed over the trees at the loss of the sun.

“Oh, and Owen’s making you egg and soldiers tomorrow, so you might want to get there early.” She smiled at her as if it was nothing in the world. “I should get back now, but happy birthday, Jamie.”

Her whole being was trembling as she sat there. Eventually, she managed to pull the talisman from her chest to wrap it up for safekeeping – an organ in her hands – taken beating from her animal chest. She moved, possessed by the manor lights she had once detested.

Her father was asleep when she stepped in the door. It was the first night she knew he had not laid there in grief, and she unlaced her boots as quietly as she could.  
Jamie folded the coat and smoothed the back of it on the chair. The talisman she placed under her pillow to lie next to her in smothered sleep, every inch of her body shining.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> since this has gotten a lot more traction than I was expecting i feel like should put a warning that there will most likely be major character deaths referenced towards the end (ones that are not necessarily in the show) 
> 
> Any other nb ghosts out there?? Thank you so much for all the kind comments recently I’m really chuffed you’re enjoying it 
> 
> I’m thinking of opening up prompts perhaps for this pairing sometime in the near future, let me know your thoughts below!! Stay safe <3


	9. This Way Comes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw; implied abuse, unreality, homophobia, some nsfw but nothing explicit

August 22nd, 1914

At the hour she awoke the sky was grey still and full of hope. Unresentful of the world to come, the girl left her bed with abandon, still somewhere on the edge of dreaming as she made her way through the rain. Her father was waiting by the stairs. “Where’re you off to?”

“Only headed to the kitchen,” she told him.

He nodded, chewing on a cigarette. “Come with me first pet, housekeeper needs to see us.”

Something the size of the stone dropped in her stomach. What the hell had she done now, Jamie wondered.   
But his hand was gentle on her shoulder, and his steps as steady as ever. They shook themselves dry before entering the manor. The Lady Wingrave passed her on the stairs and offered her a smile and the two of them a good morning. Her father must have seen the way it bruised her chest with its contentment, such a passing thing.  
“Getting on well with the house then?” he asked. Jamie thought better than to go spilling her admiration for the woman and only nodded.

Mrs. Grose was as charmed by their arrival as ever, taking her father’s hand as if he were an old friend and stoking the fire to provide a little warmth to the study room. Jamie’s insides turned. She had ever seen that kindness before unless it was to soften the blow of discharging.  
On the grand oak table, she turned over a letter and terms of employment. The bones of her father’s hands, she noted, were outlined on the chair rather sharply. He looked over the two all the same.

Jamie recognised a few words on the pages – names more than anything – and could not help but wonder if she would ever learn any more at all. Would she ever write a letter, an entry, a dream that had pinched her in the middle of the night? If she could have written by then, would she have found some release for the outpouring of adoration she held inside of her? What would be worse, her reading the letter of a feverish confession, or the girl holding her bleeding tongue for the rest of her life?

“As you can see,” Mrs. Grose said, “this means that Mr. Taylor may also be joining you as of the fourth.”  
She smiled in that way of hers. But Jamie was watching her father’s reaction. Denny was coming up there, and so soon? Did that mean that –

“And the little-un?” Her father cleared his throat, “Michael, I mean?” The blood in Jamie’s mouth could have run from her teeth surely.

“Well . . .” she took the letter to check it over again. “By all accounts, he should be coming up with him. Since your son is only sixteen, it means he may have temporary guardianship until then, if he chooses to. I can send word along though, to make sure?”

Jamie’s eyes flashed from the fireplace and back to him. He only leaned forward in his seat, conscious of the time of hers he had already taken up. “Quite alright, Mrs. Grose. Thank you, though, for your kindness. C’mon trouble,” he took his daughter’s shoulder. 

At the door, she waited until he was out of earshot to break a rare, well-meaning smile her way. “Thank you, Mrs. Grose.”

Her father barely stopped outside to wave her goodbye, but it did not matter, not when she was already sprinting to the servant’s doors and past the kitchen, not when she broke through the ripe morning drizzle, the soldered aches between her bones breaking apart after so many weeks of her being trying desperately to keep itself whole. Jamie ran for the servant’s quarters before she even understood why, only that for the first time in so goddamned long there was news – good news – and who else on earth would she have to share it with?  
The girls in the quarters were ready to leave for the day and chatting idly when the door was opened. They looked over her dripping on the stone and one of them – what was her name again, Jamie thought – did not hide her disdain.

“Sorry,” Jamie said, abashed all of a sudden. “Is Dani here?”

One of the younger girls pointed around the corner. The groundskeeper’s daughter brushed past them as if she did not know she was getting water all over their bedsheets. At the end of the day, she was the one that washed them. Other than her and Dani, the housekeeping girls very much fell under the rule of Mrs. Dudley, who worked for Mrs. Grose, but spent much more time tending to the somewhat fanciful whims of the family’s chessboard politics.

Jamie let them continue to bore their eyes in her back. She had only ever been as malignant in her attitude as she was free. To let them see her that day was meaningless in her scope of the world, to let Dani see her – see her so happy she knew that she was crying – and know that it was her that she had sought out, her own seawater eyes to tear open her chest cavity with all its humanity, that self-flagellation was a choice of her own damning.  
Jamie came to a stop by the whitewashed wall. The young woman was sitting at the end of her bed, pallid as a victim of unprecedented shock, and grasping the ends of the sheets with all her strength.

“Dan, what’s wrong?” she asked, approaching her. Dani blinked, furrowed her brow, waking only from the sound of her voice. She drew a hand back for Jamie to sit beside her.  
Despite the cold, she was only in her nightgown that hardly reached her knees. When Jamie felt her arm it was prickling with heat.

“I’m sorry,” she ran her hands over her face for a moment. “I’m sorry, am I late?”

Jamie shook her head. “No, honest, you’re fine.” She swallowed. The animal sound in her throat, brought alive at the thought of her baby brother, had curled in on itself to suffocate. “What’s wrong?”

The young American looked as if she had seen a ghost. Even her eyes had turned a shade similar to the outpour the sky had yielded down on them, and with the movement of the sun a few flecks of sullied gold seemed to cross her for a heartbeat. It was impossible, surely, that in that fraction of time her eyes had not been her own.

“I’ll be alright, I promise.” She spoke the words with disbelief. Any other day Jamie might have laughed.

“Is it your mum?” She had not seen her when she came into the quarters. The other girl sat there, dredging through her words, before she nodded.

“Sometimes,” she looked about to check that there was nobody else left there. “Sometimes it’s like she is barely even a person anymore.”  
Although the words might have been apparent to every creature that lived in the walls, Dani acted as is saying them out loud was another revelation. She was the one that dressed her mother after all, roused her if it was already midday, to ensure she had eaten and smoked at least once before dinner service to keep her temper in check; whatever her mother needed, she had learnt, could be discovered by a reading. The girl knew well the telling of others and their anatomy.  
A raised hand, for example, would never fail to remind her of her father. In the following years, anyone’s hands wrung behind their back brought her mind sweetly to the groundskeeper’s daughter, in those summer days when Jamie was seeking the courage to tell tales of her beauty between bitten lips. And her mother, her mother hung on her own precipice, not doing much of anything.

While it may not have convinced Jamie entirely, she knew better than to push for answers while she was in such a state. A pained flood of colour had returned to her at least. Any more bloodless and the girl might have disappeared into the walls completely, with only Jamie there sure that someone had once occupied the space.

The stirring of footsteps outside demanded their attention. Dani realised for a second time that she was not yet ready. Only the groundkeeper’s daughter had her hand against her arm, keeping her upright.  
And before she could say anything, she had pulled Dani to her feet, like it was a ritual they took part in every day: unspoken and intimately followed.

“I’ll . . . see you in the kitchen, then?”

“Oh, I’ll only be a second,” Dani said.

Jamie dithered there a moment, picking at her fingers. There was an unfamiliar knot in the bottom of her stomach, and in a heartbeat she was filled with a hot sense of dread that perhaps she had started bleeding. Until Dani began lifting up her nightdress and something else had scored every inch of her skin.  
Jamie averted her gaze immediately. Her hands were shaking and her thoughts burning, and she must have started bleeding then for what she felt streak through her.  
The other woman, for her part, had turned her back too, her arms up against her chest until she had on her shirt. Where on earth had such a shyness crept up on her from, she wondered. She had changed a thousand times before in front of the girls and she would a thousand times more. When she thought about it, she did not particularly care what Eddie would think if he saw her. Knowing Jamie stood there only a few feet away caused a tremor across the planes of her body.  
If they reached out their hands, she knew, they would be able to touch their fingertips together. And what would happen then? She was not a child anymore after all, perhaps those were natural intimacies everybody explored around that age.  
She tucked her shirt into her skirts with a roguish fluster.

The two of them were silent on their way up. In a bout of madness Dani had even considered asking Jamie if she had felt that shift in weight there too, but the groundskeeper’s daughter’s eyes were on the earth and her mouth busy with a thousand things.

-

Flora had fallen into a fever that evening. By nightfall, she was already dream-hopping again between memories of the house and some not so near, but they were fragmented even to her.  
Her mind was reaming over the same few words, where they were standing in the lake, drawing her across the courtyard, until they had found the hole to throw her in at the old cemetery outside the village. There were others down there, too many for her to count. Limb was pressed against callous limb and from their lungs emanated a sickness that knew the human race a lot longer than they had known it.  
They set fire to her home.

Then she was back, safe in the manor, her hand tucked securely in her mother’s as they walked around the grounds. They had not had a summer so bright in years.  
And Miles was waving her over to play cricket with them. Flora turned in her sleep.

Some nights, the Lady of the Lake went walking with her. Her face had disappeared before even Flora was born, and she turned her head like as owl as she came down the corridors, as if that alone meant she could pick up whatever resided there.  
She could not even recall when it was the first time she had seen the Lady at her door. Only that she had frozen there in her sickbed, her body turned to stone in fresh terror.  
The Lady had been leaving water on the floorboards. And Flora, in her infinite mercy, had run after her cleaning them up before Mrs. Grose found out.  
The Lady of the Lake was dragging herself down the same halls, the same stairs, as she had for hundreds of years before. What was the greatest horror, the girl wondered, never forgetting why it was she sought relief from that terrible loneliness or not remembering anything at all?

And so against every instinct in the terminal marrow of her bones, she took her hand. While she might not have known what it was she was looking for anymore, the Lady was – for the first time – no longer alone in her search. And every night she came, she unearthed some maternal measure that superseded living and would always take her back to bed before she returned for the Lake, pressing to her forehead the place where her mouth had been.  
She would have believed it all to be a dream or even just a visiting memory the next morning if it was not for the mud on her nightgown. Something had changed in the young girl after that, like all the forgotten colours of Bly could be seen after a world spent in monochrome.

From up in her bed, she felt every trembling in the house’s body. And so much had come there in her time, like the grief flooding the kitchen when the cook’s mother had died; the housekeeper’s eternal pride for the place she upkept; her brother’s emptiness and her sister’s unmitigated loss; all the dark things that crawled from the corners to haunt Miss. Clayton in the night; the grief bearing down on the Taylors with all the strength and despair of legions; the scent of the perfume her mother had worn in her teenage years.  
It was no wonder she felt sick with such humanity, the girl had the memories of centuries.

But that night the air smelt different. Even the coming frost shrank away from it. Where she was laying, time had passed so long before it did not matter anymore. And her eyes were blurred to a plateau of skin, which had not quite suffocated her mouth yet, but played at the edges each day like moths flittering over her, demanding to be swallowed, promising one day soon that too would be lost. In fact, if it were not for the sounds of the attic breathing she might not have known where she was at all. There came a thud across the floorboards.

“That all of it?”

“Reckon so.”

She craned her head. They must have been young, children almost.

“S’pose they’ve got enough trees for it all,” the boy said. If she recognised his voice at all she could not place it. Some friend in passing long since gone, perhaps.

When the girl pulled her body forward on its hands and knees, it blindly struck the chest and she let out a gasp.

The other footsteps stopped.

“You got rats or something up here?”

Flora’s heart raced from the sickbed, reverberating outward from her sleep to every room in the manor. That voice had enraptured her enough in the last two weeks that she could not help the polar pull of her form inching towards it.  
Her hands felt about her; she had cleared the breach.

“Miss. Taylor?” The voice that came out of her did not sound like her own, but it never did when she went dream-hopping.  
There came the thud of something falling.  
“Miss. Taylor, please don’t go,” she begged. She had been alone in that attic so long already. The sound of another person leaving might have broken her heart if it were still beating.

If a light fell over her, she could not see it, more that she felt the never-ending relief of being seen at last. What a meaningless reprieve it was for a body to be found in the water: long dead and bloated blue, picked at by the wet mouths of the hungry. A shudder ran through her.  
Her visitors were screaming. The sound of it had been so much like that of her child’s when she was still newborn – the desperate pleas of a body drowning for the certainty of land. The earth had spoiled them like that.

The girl begged for them not to leave her; it grew so cold in the winter and stifling in summer, and all that was left for her to hold onto was the rigid skeleton of her dress and skirts.

The newborn cries sank down the hole in the floor. It shuttered to as her hands grasped for it, deadbolts drawn across in the panic only a cautionary tale survivor could know.  
She sank back onto her knees. It had not been her own baby, had it? She may have no longer recalled her sister’s name of even her late husband’s – as all things die eventually – but that single recollection was certainly enough.

The girl began to cry. When she drew her fingers over that blank face there was nothing, nothing but what would be claimed too one day as she lost more of herself to the inevitable gravity of those godforsaken grounds.

By the time that Flora roused there were tears streaking her hair. She only had to look about for a moment before she saw what had happened. She had fallen ill again – well, she was always ill, but this was one of the worse spells. And the dreaming was always worse when she was sick. Her mother called it a ‘scare’, her father a ‘close call’. Flora did not have the heart to tell them it tasted an awful lot like what was inevitable.

Instead, she took in her mother’s face beside her and her cooling hand in her own. The doctor was packing his case to leave and Miss. Clayton was asleep on the fainting couch.  
Miss. Taylor stood at the foot of the bed with her arms crossed. There was so much concern in her posture it was almost endearing.

“Jamie?” Flora licked her lips.

“Miss. Taylor,” her mother reminded her, even exhausted at two in the morning. Doctor. Montague must have been paid an awful lot of money to be up there at that hour. But the way he looked at her before he made his leave sent tears to her mother’s eyes: ‘a lost cause’, he called it. Why were there so many names for the same thing?

“Miss. Taylor, I have to tell you something. It’s very important.”

Perplexed, the young housekeeper looked to her mother, who only managed a sad smile and ran her thumb over her hand.  
Flora hid her mouth behind her hand. Her mother worried so much already, Flora could not let her know this too. “You mustn’t go into the attic, Miss. Taylor, you must promise me you won’t go up there.”

The girl recoiled. Her gaze met Flora’s with trepidation.

“What do you mean, Miss. Wingrave?” The housekeeper seemed different than she had been in the days before, Flora saw, as if she held her chin a little higher, her body more self-assured. Some news had reached her while Flora had been away, she knew it.

“Please, promise me.” She held out her pinkie in a fit of desperation.  
Those light green eyes washed over her, and then – shaking with the premonition of what was waiting up there on the floor above them – she took Flora’s finger with her own.

The youngest Wingrave sank back with relief. When Miss. Taylor pulled away from her she kept her finger away from her palm, she noticed, like it had been snake-bitten at the contact.

Flora watched as she went to wake Miss. Clayton, but her mother took the girls wrist before she had the chance. Miss. Taylor looked up at her with lamplight eyes.

“You can let her sleep here, sweetheart, she must be exhausted.” And so Miss. Taylor only took a fresh blanket from the ottoman and drew it about her.

“Goodnight, Miss. Wingrave,” she said at the door.

“Goodnight, Miss. Taylor,” Flora peeked from under her quilt.

-

August 26th, 1914

When Dani found her out at the pet cemetery, the young woman was already hard at work. Having found herself with a rare evening off, she did not see the sense in wasting it for the sake of indolence. And so she was turning over the dead leaves and ripping away beggarweed before it had gotten the chance to kill anything else.

Her passion had been born from her own turmoil.  
Since Charlotte had brushed her wrist those few nights before, Jamie had been beside herself thinking about the woman: what she might have been doing at that time, what she had been like at their age, did she always want a husband and a family and a life like the one she had or was it only an inevitability she had inherited. A press on the back in passing – nothing but the action of a gracious host with no double entendre – turned the young housekeeper inside out.

Even her perfume lingered maddeningly for days, bright and sweet, and she had scrubbed her forearm bloody trying to rid herself of such an audacious reminder. If it had not been for her curiosity there would have come no relief.  
She awoke one morning at what must have been around five o’clock to find that she was alone in the hayloft. Her father had left his bed made and the lantern burned out – although she doubted he had been trying to decipher the letter beside it. Jamie’s eyes had been on the beams. It was not until she passed some morbid desperation that she reached down beneath the blanket and gasped at her own touch. Nothing she had ever known had made her feel like that.

But before the sun had the chance to rise she had pulled the blanket over her head and cursed herself. What on earth was she doing? Whatever mindless crush she had on the woman could not last, should not, because there was no such thing as people like her.  
The housekeeper lay there beneath the weight of it, her loneliness and shame, and the irrevocability of what she had just done. In her later life she may have accepted such a matter as pleasurable – beautiful even – but at her age she was overwrought with what she had just done to rid herself of the fragrance that the woman left on her hand.

Jamie turned to the earth. In the end, that was all there was left. Perhaps some dark room in her mind told her that creating something better of the space might balance the scales, and make up for the ailments of her nature that she could not control.  
Dani rang a tune out on the iron fence to catch her attention.

“Ey up,” Jamie smiled. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

Dani put her hands in her coat pockets. “Awfully lost, I’m afraid.” Jamie threw a stake down into the ground. “What’re you doing out here?”

“Pulling out the stranglers while I can, thought maybe some flowers might look nice in spring. ‘Is a cemetery after all.”

“That’s nice of you,” Dani said, leant against the gate. The names on the headstones could barely even be seen anymore, let alone the inscription. Only the statue of a greyhound was still standing.

“As long as it’s alright with Mr. Dudley, of course,” Jamie lit a cigarette.

“You haven’t asked him yet?”

The groundskeeper’s daughter shrugged. “So,” she made her way over to her. “Did you want to talk about what’s been botherin’ you?”

Dani’s gaze flittered over the ground. Whatever she might have said was swallowed down instead.

“I only . . .” She bowed her head again. A shiver of wind passed through the trees. Jamie watched it as if it meant something more, like marking the passage of another hour. “Can we go inside somewhere? It’s freezing out here,” she asked. “If you’re not too busy of course.”

Jamie looked from her and back up to the sky. She certainly was warm enough, her overcoat abandoned and sleeves rolled up, but it would be dark soon and she was struggling enough to do a decent job in the dying light.

“‘Course,” she snubbed out the cigarette.

They found their way to the stone church eventually, no warmer than it was out there but at least there were not a dozen other people moving about.  
Dani took a seat straight away while Jamie stood at the aisle. The stain glass split over them, segmented as neatly as fruit, reverent as the original sin. It looked rather beautiful, she thought.  
But Dani’s head was in her hands. After a while she finally straightened up and did not move to hide the fact that she had been crying.  
Jamie was torn between attempting to comfort her and leaving her to her holy solitude, especially in such a place.

“I don’t know how to say something I haven’t told anyone before,” Dani said.

Without thinking about it, Jamie went and sat in the pew in front of her. “S’Alright. Reckon I’ll just sit here a bit, and if you want to talk you can, and I’ll just listen, that way you won’t be watchin’ my reaction.” She leant forward a little on her forearms. Her body did not let her forget her war against it with the hot water, and her wrist was splitting there.

Behind her, Dani swallowed. “Who are you praying for?”

Jamie froze. Then again, she thought, if Dani wanted to tell her something she had not told another soul after only three weeks of knowing her, the least that she could do was to stop holding her tongue whenever it crossed her mind.

“Louise,” she said. “My mum.”

“Oh, you . . .” Dani was searching for the right words to say, and so Jamie extended her the courtesy of cutting off any condolences. God knows she doesn’t want them, Jamie thought, not for the woman her mother had been.

“Well, reckon no one else is going to.” Her tone drew Dani’s composure slack, she knew it, and told her intrinsically that it was alright, and that in the chapel that night those revelations they found in the space between the burdens of being human did not have to exist anywhere else. What else was God there for, she wondered, but to answer for what He had done to them?  
Dani found her courage somewhere underneath the pew – grasped it in her hands – forced it up for them to see.

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

Jamie could not help the way her body tensed, but she kept her promise to only be a silent observer. What Dani might have said there was for her own understanding, if it meant that she might sleep a little better in the night. “Sometimes I think I . . . see things that aren’t really there. They shouldn’t be, they can’t exist in any way real, but I see them all the time. My dad is . . . after he died, he was in the mirrors watching over me. So I chalked it up to grief. Only that, since Bly I’ve been remembering things, from when I was younger. This thing she – she would watch over me in the nursery, and now she watches me here. And I had to say something, somehow, so I know this at least is real, the telling of it. Because I don’t understand what I’ve done to deserve this.”

Jamie stared ahead for what might have been decades. Her eyes – wide, pale – were those of an insomniac. Because she could feel every breath her body was making and when she had counted a dozen of them, she rose against the will of her aching legs, to find Dani had left the moment she had finished confession.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading so far!! I love having a character with such a similar accent to mine I can just write ey up whenever I want 
> 
> Just a reminder too that Jamie is still young in this, so no nsfw comments pls given some elements of this chapter 
> 
> How are we feeling about perdita?? Comments alway cheer me up c: thank you for everyone that’s commented so far, afraid I won’t have wifi in the coming week as I’m in the middle of a move but I’ll find a way to keep posting 
> 
> Stay safe my lovelies!! <3


	10. In Sickness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> emetophobia tw; illness tw; internalised homophobia

August 27th, 1914

The first thing that Dani could recall that morning was a feeling of delirium. She could not see her own hands in front of her and from the intensity of the heat behind her eyes she swore the sun must have been splitting her skull open. She still insisted, of course, on returning to the manor for work.  
Mrs. Grose – given her mother’s absence – insisted that she did not take one step through the door.  
“You will stay here until you are well again. One of the other girls will take up housekeeping and Mrs. Wingrave will take care of her daughter. In the meantime, drink plenty of water. I’ll have food sent up to you in a day’s time.” She pushed her shoulders back against the bed.

“I can’t just lie here while you’re all working, ma’am, that’s not fair on you.”

“You will as long as I have anything to say about it.” Her expression softened. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but we cannot afford the risk.”

The girl at last gave into the phantom shaking of her limbs. When she next awoke, she had briefly forgotten where she was, only thankful to have forsaken the blank sea that had been drowning her. Her nightdress was clinging to her body and her stomach was in a vice grip. She threw up in a bedpan.  
Quarantined in the old wing of the previous servant’s quarters, nobody was nearby to hear her self-pitying moans. How long had she been there, the woman wondered? No doubt they had moved her as she slept. Illness made stowaways of them all and consumption was as feared as crossing the fronts in Europe.

And so she remained tethered, ageless, as so many crews had done before her in their forty-days harbour.

After the first twelve hours she could still not manage to stand on her feet and had brought up her own bodyweight in water. The room smelt rancid.  
Somebody must have been coming by while she was asleep to bring a pitcher of tonic and empty the bedpan, but as for her trembling insides they would not cease for hours yet. Feed a cold, starve a fever, they told her. She was hungry as the dogs, though.  
And so Dani sipped her water and bit on lemons to sate her until she was free.

She watched the sky through the windows. At that position – much further than their quarters to prevent contagion to the manor – she could hardly even see the sun to tell the time. Oh well, she thought. If she was better in a few days time she could be back to work again. Only the hours were bleeding into one another – full of false wakings and masochistic dreams – and she was no longer sure how much time had passed before she saw another human being.  
It was a glorious sight.

The room was golden and aching and startled by such company as the living.

“Morning, you,” Jamie smiled. She closed the door with her foot. Dani would have covered her face with her hands if she was not so glad to see her. God, she must have looked a fright.

“What time is it?” she mumbled. Her lips were still citrus-stung.

“Half past seven.” Jamie pulled the curtains back to let in some daylight. She had managed to push the ancient windows ajar. “No offense.”

Dani could not help but stare at the languid movements of such a creature.

“How long have I been here?”

“Two days, about. You feelin’ any better?”

“Like a million bucks.” She drew her fingers over her mouth. “Is anyone else sick – Flora?” She was sat upright again, which made very organ in her body lurch.

“It’s all fine, pet, don’t worry. Flora’s well, misses you I reckon. But no one else has caught anything.” Jamie’s expression was taut. She drew a tea towel from the plate, steaming. Dani had been so far from civilisation and now this Last Supper of hers was a love letter of the human race, pulling her from such loneliness as the sea with all their might.  
She forced down every mouthful. She would need it as soon as she was back to work. “Slow down, or you’ll be bringin’ it back up,” Jamie warned her. The groundskeeper’s daughter knelt to check the bedpan.

“Were you the one running back and forth for me?” Her body had stopped its shivering at the anticipation of a meal.

“Didn’t have too many volunteers, I’m afraid.”

“Sorry you had to deal with all that,” she took Jamie’s hand. The girl looked down, a slight blaze trailing across her cheeks as if they had never even spoken before. She pulled her ears back, self-conscious of Dani’s fingers over her knuckles.

“S’no problem. You should see what the horses leave us.” Jamie bit down on her lip; she was unable to maintain eye contact for long, not while Dani was sat there in a porcelain haze watching her like her life depended on it. She pulled out of her hands first.

The water to the forgotten quarters had long since been cut off, and they had to carry over a basin’s worth in buckets even if it meant it was only lukewarm by the time it was full. Jamie closed the door on one of Mrs. Dudley’s girls after thanking her for her help. She could not imagine bringing anyone else into the space while Dani was holding onto her.  
She led her over to the basin with all the care of a newborn child, taking their first tremulous steps into the sea.

“I should go, if you – ” Jamie began.

“Will you . . . stay?” Her hand was running up Jamie’s forearm to keep her upright. The girl’s stomach dropped. “Please.”

“’Course.”

When Dani had managed to pull the gown away Jamie looked at anything but the woman. Even in the water she only stared at the corner where the walls met, or the cracks in the basin, or the blood congregating at the bottom.

“You alright?” she asked, but Dani only sat hugging her knees. Jamie washed the smell of sweat from her hair and ran a flannel down her back, in a manner she could only compare to the acts of the revered. Dani shuddered at the thought. And her hands – giddy with love – she kept tight around her legs because they did not know what else to do.  
The housekeeper sat there until the water was cold. It seethed at the touch of her skin in a pleasant inferno. Dani was staring out at some space far away, one nobody who had not lived her exact life could hope to see.

“Do you think I’m insane?”

Jamie stopped. The water ran down the length of her arms.

“I reckon . . . the body creates what it needs to in order to survive. No shame in that.”

She stayed there a while until her head was buried with remorse.  
When Jamie held her arms in a frame for her to hold, her self-taught blindness was broken, and the sight of the young woman in front of her met her eyes. She had never seen another person like that before. She had rarely ever thought about it, let alone imagined any intimacies of the kind. But she still wrapped a towel around Dani and helped her step out of the tub, and the silence among them crept into every inch of her bones. If anything, the greatest surprise to Jamie was how her hands did not shake when she dried off her hair.  
For the first time in years, it was normality, mundane, how she took care of her. They both knew that something had come to pass but could not bear to say it.

Dani did not say anything as they sat on her bed, as she helped her to dress, as Jamie pulled away to clear up, until one last question when her hand was on the door.  
“Jamie?”  
The groundskeeper’s daughter looked up at her as if it were her execution.

“Thank you,” Dani said. Jamie only swallowed and closed the door behind her.

-

Jamie did not understand what the hell she was doing: did not understand the cataclysmic reaction in her body to its own chemistry. She had begun to convince herself it was because, for the first time, she was surrounded by other women – inedible, wonderful women of every shade of life – and this was only an unceremonious age to grow out of.

There was not a thing about them that she learned that did not seem to turn her life around. Even dragging the cots from Dani hair was monumental in comparison to all her years before. Some things the body could not forget. But there were other women she held in no esteem at all.  
Mrs. Dudley was a curt, greyed, daunting woman Jamie made certain to avoid, and her housekeeping girls were somehow worse. The majority of them treated Jamie like a feral cat, and could not understand why she would rather be mucking out the stables or playing with the dogs than working indoors, while the others had only ever offered her sympathy.  
The country was a cruel place to anyone like them, the motherless and the migrants, the ones who would die unmemorialized in a family plot; and what could they find there but some camaraderie if nothing else?

And what did Dani think of her now she had seen her so clearly staring? Would she tell the family, her father, have her moved away somewhere to another house? Did she think her unnatural, or only curious, or more like a sister than any other love? Sisters shared things, surely.

Perhaps she did not want to ever speak to her again. Perhaps she wanted to see what Jamie looked like too, while she was still bashful and young and there would be boys in the village too that might want to marry her.

In the end she took her frustrations out on the earth. One night Jamie ripped out every inch of beggarweed she could find, maddened at its audacity to strangle something as beautiful as a rose. By the end of the night her arms were covered in rain and bleeding stings and every thought had been blessedly exorcised from her mind. Until the next time she awoke, she had been baptised. Whatever was watching over them may have loved her yet.

Unbeknown to her, when Mr. Dudley took some of the groundskeeping boys out the following morning they were besides themselves trying to understand what kind of saint had rid them of the pest, and over every square foot of the grounds. And so they called it an act of God. What other being might there have been to have loved them to creation? How could He love them any other way?

Jamie did not say a word. She would much rather be a thing that haunted the grounds than lived them.

-

August 30th, 1914

The cook had known enough the loss that life brought to dread the coming winter. He had tried his hardest to keep the kitchen fires burning, but he could not neglect to see how fewer visitors came through that month of August, how much the working men’s club and miner’s boys had thinned out. From across the water the Western Front waited for them like a beast with its mouth open, and despite the ever-present belief of those loading onto the trains for their King and their Country, he did not believe it to be a thing that would let them go willingly.

And the kitchen had grown more and more sombre by the day. It had spread, miasmic, to the corners of the house. He conferred with the head housekeeper each morning over a pot a tea, but more often than not there was nothing to be said.  
She moved through the house lighter in those days somehow, drifting from room to room with all the grace of an heiress, and she was – to some extent – the closest to the family that there could be. Even Mrs. Dudley they did not allow close in that regard. Although Mrs. Grose was distinctly much more personable.

When Mrs. Wingrave had found that she was pregnant, each time the first person she would call upon would be Hannah. Through miscarriage and nightmarish word from across the country, it was her wheelhouse and she contained it with the upmost competency and privacy between her two hands.  
In another life, he told her, Bly Manor would be hers. It could simply not exist without her there. Hannah rolled her eyes and called him fanciful.

“You like it when I’m fanciful,” he told her.

She shook her head at him. What he did not have the nerve to tell her, of course, was that were it not for her he would have abandoned his post a long time ago. Since his mother had passed he had no reason to stay in the village, no motivation to maintain the same routine day in, day out, only to earn a living wage.  
Heaven knows he had greater aspirations for many meals to come, but a country like theirs seldom offered opportunities to men like him. The ones who spent their hours working their lives away, the ones that the bare bones of the country were built on.

And so, in the meantime, there was Bly. Bly and Mrs. Grose and tea poured between frosty mornings.

“Miss. Clayton is returning today,” she told him, leafing through the papers on the kitchen table.

“Thought that she was still on the mend?”

“Well,” she said. “She insists on coming back to work. And her temperature has dropped, at last. I will check on her though, before I clear her for active service.” She smiled despite herself. “So you’ll have her and Miss. Taylor in the evening, then?” 

“I imagine that they’ll find their way around.” 

“The closest thing you’ll have to a full kitchen at the moment, I’m afraid.”

“Mrs. Grose,” he said. “You ought to know by now it is so much more than just a kitchen.”

The girls did arrive that afternoon. Dani was still a little unsteady but certainly back in the swing of things, and they busied themselves in the corner as if in a world of their own.  
Owen set then on prepping for the weeks baking first; vegetable prep was never much in regards to entertainment, and the girls’ cold hands made working the pastry an awful lot easier.

He caught them stealing glances from one another every once in a while, flushed from the work of constant kneading, or making each other laugh with a comment only meant to be heard by them. But it was a cold night and the fires, much like the company, were very much welcome. Mrs. Grose joined them long after the other cooks had gone home, and Owen poured out four glasses from his hidden reserve.

“What’re we toasting?” Dani asked, perplexed.

“To your health,” Owen told her. They would drink well to that.

But once the clock declared it midnight, the two young housekeepers hurried to get cleared and a few hours sleep, while he and Mrs. Grose stayed for another round, and then another. At least their work would mean they had shaved time from the morning service.

“They seem well,” he said, once they remained there alone.

“All things considered,” she agreed. “Although I do worry about my girls sometimes.”

“You have enough to worry about already,” he set his glass down, “such as an entire manor. Who is left to worry about you?”

“Well, what do you think they hired you for?” It had been her – in the end – that had encouraged Charlotte to give the man a chance, when he was young still and the only string to this bow were the many years work in the village kitchens under his mother’s tuition. But there was something about him, she swore, about that curious and charming man, that gave her a good feeling of what he might achieve there.  
When he next looked at the clock, it was past one already.

“Well, I should be heading back. I’ll be starting at five tomorrow.”

“You can’t expect I’ll let you walk all the way down to the village at this hour, in this cold?”

“Please, Hannah, I’ll be quite alright.”

“You can just take the room where the old library used to be, the bed was made up this morning. I won’t have you trampling out there, dragging it all back in in the morning,” she told him.

Owen smiled, “Well, thank you then, Mrs. Grose.”

“We must be careful these days, and look out for one another. The way they speak in the village, they’ll be looking twice at anyone they decide not to be “British enough.’”

“In that case, thank you again, for coming to my rescue.” He raised his empty glass to her.

“You always came to mine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your patience!! I haven’t had wifi this past week but will do soon 
> 
> I hope you’re all staying safe and not too cold if you’ve had as much snow as we have here <3


	11. Something to Hold Onto

September 4th 1914

The road was as blue as it was loathsome. By the time they had begun the final leg up to the house, the wind had dropped completely, leaving them alone in that silent, alien stretch of space. The boy had his head tucked in his neck the entire time.

On the ride up to Bly, there were only four others sat in the back. Every roll of the wheels lulled them to sleep but the cold – inescapable – would surely come to snatch it from them. His brother had cried for days; when all else had failed, he had just held onto him until he at last fell asleep.  
And then one by one more people stepped off along the way, on the promise for work or family or conscription. He was only glad his father had managed to find something for them, all of them, if it meant he would no longer be saddled with his little brother. Not that he did not love him, but he did not know how to take care of a three year old, that was not his role in the world.

Perhaps a woman at the manor might take care of him, at least until his sister was older and began to act like she ought to. It was not right for her to be milling about on the grounds all the time. But until they found someplace for his brother – half-brother, his mind stung cruelly – she would have to do.

There had been only one other traveller in the back of the ride when they reached the village. The drivers were quick to shunt them so that they could get a pint of something at the local establishment, and he stopped briefly outside the post office to count what change they had left. That, the case with all their belongings and the clothes on their backs were all they had brought with them. What else did they have to bring?

There was not much more left to Bly, the top of a church tower could be seen in the distance and they had passed an old cemetery on the way in. That, and the couple of rows of village houses by the thatch-roof pub.  
As they broke across the bridleway the only semblance of the city life so far from home was a railroad track in a grey vein of earth. Then they passed the trees and the open space revealed just how far the hills reached over the horizon. And of course, strung along it all, the dry stone walls so much a part of the English countryside it was hard to imagine it could ever have existed without them. Perished, the boy held onto the sides of his coat.

“Almost there now,” he told him.

It was twelve o’clock at the manor and the groundskeepers would be much further out on the property, further than he could see. He took them around to the side, where he hoped the servant’s door might be, but he was stopped by a voice.

“Mr. Taylor?”

He turned in the middle of the courtyard. “Yes.”

The woman smiled as she approached them, shaking his hand with far more familiarity than he was used to.

“Mrs. Grose. I am the head housekeeper here at Bly, it’s very nice to meet you.”

“Thank you,” he said, shifting the boy in his hands. “Have you seen my father at all?”

“He’s out with the horses I believe, but I can show you to where they’ve been staying to take your case, then you can look over your contract upstairs, if you’d like?” She had her hands laced together.

“Right, of course,” he said. “I should probably head out there too.”

From the other side of the courtyard, the two housekeepers had come from stripping the servant’s quarters. The girl dropped her basket of linen to the ground. “Mikey?” she called.

Jamie broke into a run when she saw them. It did not matter then how her older brother’s eyes flicked over her, how his mouth turned upwards the same way hers would when she was biting back something she could not say. Her hands wrapped around the child instinctively.

“Jamie!” the child shouted, far too loudly, as if the contact had awoken him from his weeks-long stupor.  
Rocking him in her arms, Jamie broke out into a smile. When he grasped at her collar, she only laughed, not like she used to be whenever he tried to cling to her. Then again, in only two months time he had lost a lot more than any three-year-old ought to have. The boy needed something left to hold on to. At last, she met her older brother’s gaze.

“You’ve grown,” he said.

Jamie only shrugged. “Road up alright?”

“It was fine,” Denny told her.

The other girl had come to join them, if somewhat tentative so as not to invade the moment, only she must have seen how the two of them stood facing away from one another. Her expression softened when she saw how Jamie was holding onto Mikey, how she kissed him once on the crown of his head as she had promised herself she would if she ever saw him again.

“Jamie,” the boy repeated.

“You got him, then?” Denny asked. Jamie nodded and ran her thumb over her little brother’s hand. “Better get to it.” He took his case and allowed Mrs. Grose to lead him inside.

-

Of all the things Dani might have expected to see that morning, it was not her fellow housekeeper – so rough around the edges, so quick to rage at her only weeks before – coddling the infant like something precious and telling him how much she missed him, how sorry she was to have ever let him go. Her heart broke all over again for the girl. Too many things were mourned for in their lifetime, long after they had gone, neglected while they were there.

It came as no surprise to her that she was resistant to taking care of Flora, it had not been long since she thought that she would never see her brother again.

“He’s got you in your night shirt, what’s he done that for?” Jamie asked him. Mikey held his arms up, expecting her to amend the situation right then. She pulled them back down to his sides and wrapped his blanket around him. The sight of Dani stood beside them must have shaken her out of that space for a moment. But it was one she had crafted especially for them, Dani knew, one which she had allowed herself to dream of in the time between losing him and holding him again.

“I’m sorry, Dani.” Jamie stared, a rueful blush over her cheeks.

“It’s fine,” Dani smiled. “Don’t worry about it, please. Go take care of him and I’ll see you a little later?” She stacked the linen Jamie had been carrying on top of her own.

The girl’s shoulders dropped. “Thanks, Dan. I’ll need to find someone to mind him or . . .”

“We’ll figure it out,” Dani said. “I promise.” 

Not wanting to linger too long in their way, she took the linen to be washed and went up to see Flora. The girl was awake and standing by her window.

“Flora?” Dani asked. She did not turn to see her. “Flora?”

Dani shut the door. Flora jumped at the sound, “Miss. Clayton?”

“Are you alright? I didn’t know you’d gotten out of bed.”

She looked back at her sickbed then out the window. “I’m – I’m alright, Miss. Clayton. Do we have a visitor today?”

“We have a new arrival,” Dani said, taking her shoulder. “Did you see them?” Her window was not quite facing the courtyard.

“No,” Flora said. “But the house feels happier, a bit.”

Dani frowned. The girl had begun to pale. “Maybe you’ll get to meet them, soon. In the meantime, let’s get you back into bed.” She pulled the covers back for her.

“Would you mind staying here, just until I fall asleep?”

“Of course, sweetheart,” Dani told her. “Are you feeling sick?”

“Not today. I only keep having nightmares before I fall asleep.”

Dani smiled. “I don’t know if you can have nightmares before you fall asleep, Miss. Wingrave.” She smoothed the blankets down. “What did you dream about?”

“There was a ghost,” she said. “A woman, I think.”

There was a stone in her stomach. “I’m sorry, that must have been frightening. But the ghost went away, didn’t it?”

Flora looked up at her. “It never goes away.”

“Flora, I . . .”

“And in the dream, it was just standing there.”

“In your bedroom?”

She shook her head. “In the quarters where you sleep.”

“I didn’t think you’d ever been in there, Flora?”

“I was only there to see what it was looking at,” she said. “It was watching you.”

-

Jamie could not sleep that night for all the exhaustion in her body. Instead she laid back in the cot, Mikey in his makeshift bed next to her. After fussing for a while, Mikey had at last settled when she had given him the talisman, which he fell asleep holding. Only now she found she could not sleep without it there. Jamie laid with her hands on her stomach. Her father’s back was turned – he was sleeping better than he had for days – but they had barely said a word to one another when they had been together.

When she looked back at him, Mikey was awake, staring at her. There were tears running down his face. Jamie knelt forward and gathered him up. His sobbing grew louder once he was pressed against her, as if he too did not want to wake anyone else.

“I know, mate, I know,” she whispered, taking them out the room. The steps outside were freezing under her bare feet and she shuddered through it. At least out there she could wipe his face dry as he cried freely, but the wind was cutting and she had to smother him in blankets to keep him warm. She herself was only in a nightshirt.

Out in the woods a vixen was shrieking and she thought distantly of the chicken coop. A new litter in the spring hungry for the larder.  
Jamie took a few steps away from the stables until her little brother quietened down. But the boy had stopped his terrible wracking and she realised then it was only because he was pointing to something. Jamie followed his gaze.

Something was watching them from the manor doorway. The feeling that came over her she could not contain – fear maybe, meekness even – but no, it could not be denied. The spectre stared at her from across the courtyard and she stared back. Familiarity, she swore, of an unexplainable kind. Not that of an old friend or a face in passing; Jamie could have sworn she knew that watcher inside and out, and it knew her, with no regard if she ever wanted to know it or not.  
The ghost was wearing an oversized jacket that fell below its hips. Its figure was feminine but no real features of it remained, no colour or laughter lines, except how it tilted its head to take them both in and held its fists at its side.  
So thin was the outline of it if she were to glance once in its direction she would be sure that nothing was there. But the ghost began to cross the distance to the treeline and it did not look back at them once. Mikey watched it the entire time, hand outstretched to grasp onto its sleeve.

The boy began to cry. Startled, Jamie went to shush him, but he only grew more desperate. He had not cried like that since their mother had died – and from their distance, from that irrevocable familiarity, she could hardly blame him for thinking it was her.

“It’s not Louise, Mikey,” she whispered. “Not Louise.”

The ghost was still standing among the trees, its head tipped back at where the pines met the sky’s blankness.  
Shivering, and mourning, and full of love for whatever her brother thought he might have seen, Jamie swallowed every instinct that crawled from her marrow and began to walk. All at once, Mikey sunk back into her.

The ground was softer there and pleasantly cool, even if the only heat she could feel any longer was from the child in her arms.  
It was waiting for her by the abandoned well and its shoulders were hanging with grief. It looked up at her. Her blood staggered through her.

“What do you want?” Jamie shouted. “What do you want?”

The spectre stepped towards her. She pulled Mikey back, as if that might protect him. From above them, the sky had cleared, flooding the forest floor with seawater light. Every sound from the trees was jarring to the things that walked below them.

When she looked back, they were alone.

Jamie dug her heels into the earth. Just look down, she cursed herself, what the hell are you so afraid of?  
She approached the well, wind-bitten to the bone. Their eyes were bright as they passed down the stone wall – brighter than lamps along the road – for however long it was they stood there. There was nothing waiting for them down there.

When she stumbled back she felt something shudder through her, and for a moment her organs abandoned their mortal agency, and the spectre passed through her and out the other side. Jamie had never felt another creature move through her skin before. She did not feel completed by that other whole so much as she had been swallowed alive. Before she could stop herself, Jamie too was crying. She turned her back on the trees and did not stop until they were at the stables.  
There, at last in her bed, she laid petrified. Her eyes scored frantically into the beams. Out in the woods, the ghost sat at the edge of the well, waiting for the sun to return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mulder voice: do you think I’m spooky? 
> 
> Sorry for any mistakes on this it’s midnight here and idk how I feel about this chapter 
> 
> Hope you’re all staying safe!! <3


	12. This Land is Your Land

11th September, 1914

The previous days in the manor had been some of the busiest they had seen all year. Visitors from the capital were turning up with only a day’s notice, requiring rooms for them and their partners and three meals a day, tea in the afternoon, and drinks at night as they talked for hours with the Lord Wingrave behind his office door. The housekeepers and the cooks were run ragged in a matter of days.

And the gardens of Bly were famous through the county – even in September – as the last flowers clung vigilant to their trellises and the leaves fell like seawater across the grounds.  
Some of the younger men would go out beating with Miles or Mr. Quint if he was about, sometimes for hours at a time and the latest edition to Mr. Dudley’s staff was finding himself working day and night to keep the stables running.

Jamie watched them leave that day from the courtyard. Behind her, the smoke from the kitchens was burning away at the cerulean sky. Even the ovens were being overworked and they would be out of fuel by the end of the day.  
One of the ratters had recognised Jamie and was skirting around her. She knelt for Mikey to see him better.

“See? Nice doggie,” she told him. “Chases the bastard rats away.”  
Her little brother reached for its greyed muzzle, and shrieked with delight when it licked into his palm. The terrier went giddy with the attention. “Prefer them to people, do ya’? Yeah, me too.”

The young woman got back to her feet. It would not do to dither any longer.  
Dani was already upstairs by ten o’clock, readying four of the rooms in the far wing.

“Good morning,” she said as they came to join her. “How’s the handsomest boy I know?” The housekeeper took Mikey from her as she readied for the day.

“Needs to start earning his bloody keep,” Jamie told her, which won her a smile from the young American.

“Is she being mean to you?” Dani whispered. “Don’t worry about her, she’s just mardy in the mornings.”

“That all I am to you?” Jamie raised an eyebrow. Mikey was holding onto Dani’s thumb, his wide eyes imploring.

“And the afternoons, and the evenings.”

Jamie had the cloth tied securely around her shoulder. “Gis’im here, then.” She had taken to carrying him in the wraparound for most of the time since his arrival, so that he may be hanging from her back as she went about the manor, not only to ensure he did not get himself into trouble as she might have claimed, but to feel the material weight of him against her was a blessing in itself.  
As long as it did not slow her down, Mrs. Grose had no real issue, unless there were guests nearby who might have seen her. An older girl in the quarters was looking after two young children, Hannah had told her, and would gladly take Mikey too but Jamie would not give him up without a fight. The only line she did not cross was in the kitchen – which was without a doubt the last place in the manor for a child – not when she was used to her thin frame being able to pass behind the backs of cooks and burners.  
And so in the evenings, she set him down for a nap or him in a corner where she could keep an eye on him. It was not as if Denny would take him and her father had barely raised a child before, not even in the half-hearted way Louise had. Jamie knew better than to remind them she had never learnt how to raise a child before either, aside from her years spent haphazardly taking care of herself, and so when it fell to her she caught him in her arms out of pure instinct.

It was not until the day before that Dani shared her own thoughts with such offhandedness it was unreal: “I don’t know if you ever learn how to raise someone,” she shrugged, “you just do.”

To Jamie it was a revelation. She would do better this time, she promised him, she would do better because second chances were such a rare miracle to be had. And she understood what had been made of them from all that they had lost, the grief of it, the unadulterated anger that their mother could have left them, hand-in-hand with bloody consumption that even she did not intent to court.  
She wanted to swim down to the bottom of the lake so that nobody could hear her scream her words of agony, as Mikey did when he cried and cried, and she pulled him to her chest so that he did not wake the sleepers.

And he was so young still, his needs were tenfold just as hers had once been. So for a while she allowed herself to curse them, curse Louise and Denny and her father even, for the boy’s sake as much as hers.

Each morning, Dani would step around the two of them to check each knot was in place. “You ready?” she asked. Mikey loved the colour of her hair.

“What’s all this for?” Jamie asked her, nodding to the stacks of bedsheets.

“Visitors from someplace, army sergeants apparently.” Dani took the other end of the bed. “They’re going to try convince Lord Wingrave to give up some men for the war effort.”

“Some men?” Jamie asked.

“Some of Mr. Dudley’s boys. Ollie was talking about it.” The rooms had not been aired properly in weeks.

“What, like Denny?”

“I don’t know . . . he might not be old enough to enlist,” Dani said, pausing. “You look like him, you know?”

Jamie did not speak for a moment, pretending to focus on folding up the linen. Their resemblance was not particularly striking except up close: they had the same shade of green in their eyes, that of a summer forest, the same sharpness of jaw and nose, even his frame beneath his winter coat was that of a labourer – an underfed child perhaps, but a labourer nonetheless.  
Had Dani noticed her brother walking around, or did she only study Jamie enough to have noticed him a mile away? And if she saw that, did she see how Mikey was not quite the same, his hair blonder, his eyes darker? Jamie bristled.

“You friends with that Ollie, then?” she had asked, more to change the subject, but she realised after a moment how possessive she may sound.

“I suppose,” Dani shrugged. “He was kind to me when my dad . . . he was kind to me. Before any of the other boys were.”

Jamie raised her eyebrows, her neck still bent. She was sure that there were plenty of boys who were sweet on Dani.

“Why?”

Jamie looked up. But Dani’s eyes were soft, enquiring. For a moment Jamie could have forgotten that there was a baby strapped to her back.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just have a hard time trusting the groundkeeper’s boys, from experience, I mean.”

“You didn’t like them?” Her gaze had become thoughtful, as if she expected to have excavated some story of pain.

“They didn’t like me.” She threw the last of the bedsheets in the basket and took them out the door. They spent the rest of the morning upstairs, stopping only once when the kitchen bell rang, then took to the wash rooms for the time being.

“Can I leave you here a moment?” Dani asked. “There’s something I’ve forgotten to do.”

Jamie nodded. “’Course.” And then it was only the two of them in the tapered wash room, steam billowing out across the floor among the hiss of water. Mikey was asleep behind her again – he had been drifting in and out all day.

The wash room door closed quietly. Jamie pulled her hand from the water, where her skin was left seething the colour of roses.

“’Morning, Mrs. Clayton,” she said when the woman saw her.

“Good morning, Miss. Taylor.” The woman came about the other side to begin. “Back on wash duty, I see?”

Jamie nodded. The heat was making her cheeks flush but the older woman – looking a little less jagged, a little less hollow than she had been before – hardly seemed to notice. The ripe sting of the air drifted over her, undisturbed.

“You get to the ironing if you like, your hands are younger, and you’re better at ironing the pleats anyway.” She reached down to empty the basin as if it were nothing.

“Thank you, Mrs. Clayton.” Jamie much preferred the ironing – in a matter of weeks she had surpassed even Dani with her deft, precise fingers turning the cotton in perfect rhythm.

“Is this your little brother?”

Jamie turned. “Yeah, sorry, I just don’t have anywhere I can leave him right now.”

“No need to apologise, I am sure he is doing a wonderful job making the young ladies swoon around the manor.” Jamie managed to hide the way her body cringed at the comment. “If you ever need someone to watch over him, do let me know, I spend most of my time in the quarters anyway.”

“Really?” the young woman asked, incredulous. She turned the wraparound so that he was clinging to her arms.

“Of course, I haven’t held a baby since Danielle, or her . . .” the woman stopped herself, shaking her head. “What do you say, should we give your sister an afternoon to herself, young man?”

A little too stunned to do anything else, Jamie passed the toddler over to her so that they woman could rock him for a moment.

“Well, aren’t you handsome? What a lovely green eyes you have.”

Jamie could not help but smile and think of Dani, perhaps she was more like her mother than she had first expected.

“Thank you, Mrs. Clayton, I really would appreciate it.”

Mrs. Clayton shook her head, “You take care of yourself for a while, sweetheart, you look exhausted.”

-

They spent the afternoon of Sunday the 11th walking through the woods. Dani had finished her morning chores an hour early, and Jamie was beginning to trust Mrs. Clayton enough for her to take care of her little brother for a couple of hours at a time. Mikey was quite taken with her, even if it was only because she reminded him a little of Dani, and the woman’s nature was somewhat gentler around the baby, a kind of hopefulness she had reserved only for a soul so young.  
Jamie was relieved. She had not been sleeping since their encounter at the well, adamant to protect them from whatever the hell was out there, and it offered her even just a moment’s respite so that she might gather herself

She was, by nature, a solitary creature. She thrived on the violence of the midday sky and the shiver of the trees, and such peace could not be found in a manor house. And so she buried her desperation in the pit of her stomach. One day, she swore, she might be completely and blessedly alone.

The only exception was the other housekeeper, their quiet so familiar it could have been formed from the marrow of their bones, their step so amicable, their destination so promised, not a word could be said for a hundred years and they knew that they would be completely at peace.

They wandered that day across the cemetery after service, trying to find the oldest dates on the headstones as if they might speculate on the lives they lived, and Dani counting off all the names she knew as ancestors from the village – Smith, Lee, Land – while Jamie listened to every word.  
The sight of the meadowland beyond the fence astounded them, to be at such heartland, such country, that the groundkeeper’s daughter belonged to with a nucleic intimacy, that she knew without a doubt she would only give back to it when she died.  
Close your eyes and think of England, was that how the saying went? Jamie was too young to know what such a thing meant. But at moments like that when she found herself staring out at the country, she could not help but think of what a lovely place it was to bear witness to.  
And how would it be, in four years time? Bombed, blistered, turned the colour of lake water? The warblers passed through the wheat ears in a scattered fervour. A shiver ran through her. She could only think of a bird defending its nest – bull-headed, certain to die – against the cat crawling close to the isle.

But they did not talk of such things that afternoon; they enjoyed the sight of the sun, the running water, they did not talk of elevations of ghosts, or dead parents, or the things that haunted them at night. In those few fields marked so many years before by Roman ground, they did not have to live with the thought of Austro-Hungarian prisoners taken that day or the sinking of tankers out in the Pacific Ocean. Jamie recounted the names of wildflowers they passed and Dani picked one of each to give to her. They collected rocks from the stream to break open, as delighted as children at the discovery of ferns impressed countless years before in the forgotten stone. Dani splashed her at knee-height in the water.

“How dare you?” Jamie smiled. There had never been a time she was so forgetful of ghosts.

“Pretty easily, it seems,” Dani said.

Jamie dragged her arms through the water to send a wave over her. Dani shrieked with laughter and the sun passed over them. Shivering and sky-warm and breathless with love, they made their way to the bank.

“We should probably get back soon,” Dani said, taking her hand.

“Just another minute,” Jamie told her, leaning back along the grass, “just another minute.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!! Another short chapter I know, but I hope you enjoyed it <3 
> 
> I grew up in a village and we used to check the dates on the headstones because apparently we were very creepy and had nothing better to do!! Good old England
> 
> Go check out my friend’s writing @totheflame they’re bloody talented!!


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